In this paper, we briefly present RELXILL_NK, the first and currently only readily available model of the relativistic reflection spectrum of black hole accretion disks that includes non-Kerr solutions for the black hole spacetime, thus allowing for tests of the Kerr hypothesis and GR. RELXILL_NK makes use of a general relativistic ray-tracing code to calculate the relativistic effects of any well-behaved, stationary, axisymmetric, and asymptotically flat black hole spacetime, while the disk physics is handled through the non-relativistic X-ray reflection code XILLVER. A number of different flavors are available within RELXILL_NK; we summarize and compare these flavors using the Johannsen metric for the black hole spacetime.
@article{arxiv.1908.10152,
title = {RELXILL_NK: A Black Hole Relativistic Reflection Model for Testing General Relativity},
author = {Askar B. Abdikamalov and Dimitry Ayzenberg and Cosimo Bambi and Sourabh Nampalliwar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.10152},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
8 Pages, 2 figures, 2 tables. Conference proceedings based on a talk given at the meeting "Recent Progress in Relativistic Astrophysics" (6-8 May 2019, Shanghai, China). Content overlap with arXiv:1902.09665