Bridging Scales in Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: Subgrid Prescription from First Principles
Abstract
Understanding how supermassive black holes (BHs) couple to their host galaxies across a vast spatial and temporal dynamic range remains a central challenge in galaxy evolution. Using the multizone framework -- designed to capture bidirectional inflow--outflow from the event horizon to the Bondi scale -- we present a suite of long-duration GRMHD simulations spanning BH spins --0.9 and Bondi radii --. From these simulations we derive spin-dependent subgrid prescriptions from first principles, applicable to hot accretion flows with low-Eddington ratios (), for adoption in cosmological simulations and semi-analytic models. We provide compact analytic fits for the time-averaged accretion rate and feedback power with respect to the Bondi rate , which are largely insensitive to the initial gas configuration and magnetic field strength. To capture intrinsic time-variability, we also quantify the full distributions of and feedback efficiency , both well described by lognormal statistics, with widths that increase toward larger . We further measure self-consistent spin evolution in the hot accretion mode, finding that the spin-up parameter varies as , which implies a very long spindown timescale . Thus, BH spins are effectively frozen during phases of quiescent accretion. Compared to conventional small-domain GRMHD calculations, our simulations, which reach dynamical equilibrium across horizon-to-galaxy scales, yield systematically different long-term accretion, feedback, and spin properties, cautioning against direct extrapolation from small-scale GRMHD simulations when constructing galactic-scale subgrid models.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.15560,
title = {Bridging Scales in Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: Subgrid Prescription from First Principles},
author = {Hyerin Cho and Ben S. Prather and Ramesh Narayan and Kung-Yi Su and Angelo Ricarte and Priyamvada Natarajan and Antonio J. Porras-Valverde},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15560},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
10 pages, 4 figures