Black hole spectral states revealed in GRMHD simulations with texture memory accelerated cooling

Abstract

X-ray binaries (XRBs) display spectral state transitions that are accompanied by substantial changes in the hardness, luminosity, and structure of the accretion flow. We developed a GPU-accelerated cooling toolkit for general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of accreting black holes that uses texture memory for fast retrieval of pre-computed values. The toolkit incorporates bremsstrahlung, synchrotron, inverse Compton radiation and Coulomb collision processes. We implemented our toolkit into a GRMHD code and used it to simulate a magnetically arrested disk in the context of the XRB low/hard state around a Kerr black hole. We explored the mass accretion rate in the $\sim (10^{-6}-0.3){\dot{M}}_{\mathrm{Edd}}$ range, where ${\dot{M}}_{\mathrm{Edd}}$ is the Eddington accretion rate. Our simulations reveal that for low accretion rates ($\dot{M}\lesssim 0.01{\dot{M}}_{\mathrm{Edd}}$), the flow settles into a geometrically thick, low-density, two-temperature hot accretion flow. At higher accretion rates, the flow turns into a cold single-temperature thin disk at $r_{\mathrm{in}}\gtrsim 50r_g$. Inside, the disk breaks up into single-temperature thin filaments embedded into a two-temperature hot thick flow. Our GPU texture memory accelerated cooling prescription is $3-5$ times faster than the standard radiation M1 closure methods, and $\sim 5$ times faster than storing the lookup table in global memory.

Submitted to PRD