Related papers: On the Thermal Stability of Radiation Dominated Ac…
When the accretion rate is more than a small fraction of Eddington, the inner regions of accretion disks around black holes are expected to be radiation-dominated. However, in the alpha-model, these regions are also expected to be thermally…
(shortened) We calculate the vertical structure of a local patch of an accretion disk in which heating by dissipation of MRI-driven MHD turbulence is balanced by radiative cooling. Heating, radiative transport, and cooling are computed…
Standard models of radiation supported accretion disks generally assume that diffusive radiation flux is solely responsible for vertical heat transport. This requires that heat must be generated at a critical rate per unit volume if the…
We present results of a set of three-dimensional, general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of thin accretion discs around a non-rotating black hole to test their thermal stability. We consider two cases, one that is…
The standard thin disk model predicts that when the accretion rate is over a small fraction of the Eddington rate, which corresponds to $L \ga 0.06 L_{Edd}$, the inner region of the disk is radiation-pressure-dominated and thermally…
A long-standing puzzle in the study of black-hole accretion concerns the presence or not of thermal instability. Classical theory predicts the encircling accretion disk is unstable, as do some self-consistent MHD simulations of the flow.…
The magnetorotational instability (MRI) drives magnetized turbulence in sufficiently ionized regions of protoplanetary disks, leading to mass accretion. The dissipation of the potential energy associated with this accretion determines the…
We explore the thermodynamic and global structural properties of a local patch of an accretion disk whose parameters were chosen so that radiation pressure and gas pressure would be comparable in magnitude. Heating, radiative transport, and…
Turbulence is crucial for protoplanetary disk dynamics, and Vertical Shear Instability (VSI) is a promising mechanism in outer disk regions to generate turbulence. We use Athena++ radiation module to study VSI in full and transition disks,…
In this paper we consider two outstanding intertwined problems in modern high-energy astrophysics: (1) the vertical thermal structure of an optically thick accretion disk heated by the dissipation of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence…
The vertical structure of black hole accretion disks in which radiation dominates the total pressure is investigated using a three-dimensional radiation-MHD calculation. The domain is a small patch of disk centered 100 Schwarzschild radii…
A certain appeal to the alpha model for turbulence and related viscosity in accretion disks was that one scales the Reynolds stresses simply on the thermal pressure, assuming that turbulence driven by a certain mechanism will attain a…
We present the results of a series of radiation-MHD simulations of a local patch of an accretion disk, with fixed vertical gravity profile but with different surface mass densities and a broad range of radiation to gas pressure ratios. Each…
In the classic picture of standard thin accretion disks, the viscous heating is balanced by the radiative cooling through the diffusion process, and the radiation-pressure-dominated inner disk suffers convective instability. However, recent…
We investigate the thermal stability of optically thin, two-temperature, radiative cooling-dominated accretion disks. Our linear analysis shows that the disk is thermally unstable without magnetic fields, which agrees with previous…
The standard equilibrium for radiation-dominated accretion disks has long been known to be viscously, thermally, and convectively unstable, but the nonlinear development of these instabilities---hence the actual state of such disks---has…
Analogous to the HR diagram for stars, the thermal equilibrium curve encodes the thermodynamics of accretion disks by expressing the local balance between heating -- primarily via viscous dissipation -- and cooling -- typically through…
The saturation level of the magneto-rotational instability (MRI) in a strongly radiation dominated accretion disk is studied using a new Godunov radiation MHD code in the unstratified shearing box approximation. Since vertical gravity is…
We investigate the saturation level of hydromagnetic turbulence driven by the magnetorotational instability in the case of vanishing net flux. Motivated by a recent paper of Bodo, Cattaneo, Mignone, & Rossi, we here focus on the case of a…
We examine the small-scale dynamics of black hole accretion disks in which radiation pressure exceeds gas pressure. Local patches of disk are modeled by numerically integrating the equations of radiation MHD in the flux-limited diffusion…