English

$\kappa$monty: a Monte Carlo Compton Scattering code including non-thermal electrons

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2023-10-04 v2

Abstract

Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei are strong sources of X-ray emission produced by Compton scattering originating from the accretion flows surrounding their supermassive black holes. The shape and energy of the resulting spectrum depend on the shape of the underlying electron distribution function (DF). In this work, we present an extended version of the grmonty code, called κ\kappamonty. The grmonty code previously only included a thermal Maxwell J\"utner electron distribution function. We extend the gromty code with non-thermal electron DFs, namely the κ\kappa and power-law DFs, implement Cartesian Kerr-Schild coordinates, accelerate the code with MPI, and couple the code to the non-uniform AMR grid data from the GRMHD code BHAC. For the Compton scattering process, we derive two sampling kernels for both distribution functions. Finally, we present a series of code tests to verify the accuracy of our schemes. The implementation of non-thermal DFs opens the possibility of studying the effect of non-thermal emission on previously developed black hole accretion models.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.15522,
  title  = {$\kappa$monty: a Monte Carlo Compton Scattering code including non-thermal electrons},
  author = {Jordy Davelaar and Benjamin R. Ryan and George N. Wong and Thomas Bronzwaer and Hector Olivares and Monika Mościbrodzka and Charles F. Gammie and Heino Falcke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15522},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:36:35.522Z