English

Supermassive Black Holes: modelling strongly and weakly magnetised misaligned accretion disks

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-05-27 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we carry out a numerical study of misaligned accretion disks around spinning supermassive black holes. Here, we conduct a parameter survey covering a range of initial disk misalignment angles (Tinit=15,45,75\mathcal{T}_\mathrm{init}=15^\circ, 45^\circ, 75^\circ) with either the Magnetically Arrested Disk (MAD) or Standard And Normal Evolution (SANE) magnetic field configurations, using the general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) code KHARMA. We find that models in the MAD state can align with the black hole up to 10rg\sim10 \, r_g, even in extremely misaligned models (Tinit=75\mathcal{T}_\mathrm{init}=75^\circ), which has not been seen before. Models without a dynamically important magnetic field remain misaligned up to the black hole, with a maximum disk tilt at 10rg\sim10 \, r_g, the peak's radial distance from the black hole increases with increasing disk misalignment. However, the maximum disk tilt does not have a linear relationship with the initial disk misalignment, and appears to have a maximum value of 50\sim50^\circ. We also show misaligned disk simulations produced in KHARMA are consistent with other GRMHD codes, for a variety of problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.27334,
  title  = {Supermassive Black Holes: modelling strongly and weakly magnetised misaligned accretion disks},
  author = {Joshua Samuel Stanway and Cora Prather and Derek Ward-Thompson and Timothy J. Walton and Brett Patterson and Hyerin Cho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.27334},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 12 figures