Photon Damping of Waves in Accretion Disks

Abstract

MHD turbulence is generally believed to have two important functions in accretion disks: it transports angular momentum outward, and the energy in its shortest wavelength modes is dissipated into the heat that the disks radiate. In this paper we examine a pair of mechanisms which may play an important role in regulating the amplitude and spectrum of this turbulence: photon diffusion and viscosity. We demonstrate that in radiation pressure-dominated disks, photon damping of compressive MHD waves is so rapid that it likely dominates all other dissipation mechanisms.

30 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (4)

• Particle Heating by Alfvenic Turbulence in Hot Accretion Flows
• Photon Bubbles in Accretion Discs
• Radiative Efficiency of Collisionless Accretion
• Compton Scattering by Static and Moving Media I. The Transfer Equation and Its Moments

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