Disk reprocessing in three dimensions - emerging spectra and polarization
Abstract
We present the latest results from our ongoing computation of a new X-ray reprocessing model for irradiated, ionized accretion disks observed e.g. in active galactic nuclei and X-ray binaries. Combining a semi-analytical radiative transfer method (TITAN) with Monte-Carlo simulations (STOKES), we obtain a grid of reprocessed intensity and polarization spectra across an energy range of 0.1--100 keV with sufficient energy resolution to be applied to NuSTAR and even Astro-H observations. The model includes all polar and, for the first time, also azimuthal dependencies of the local incident and emission angles. As it was shown previously, these dependencies matter once the observed spectrum at infinity is computed by a relativistic ray-tracing routine. The Monte-Carlo treatment of the disk reprocessing also allows us to investigate in detail the impact of thermal and turbulent velocity on the line transfer, which can affect the observed amount of soft X-ray emission. Finally, we explore the impact of the high and low energy cutoff of the irradiating spectrum on the reprocessing and we determine the timing response of the disk spectrum as a function of photon energy. We conduct a comparison of our results with existing X-ray reprocessing models.
- Publication:
-
The Extremes of Black Hole Accretion
- Pub Date:
- July 2015
- Bibcode:
- 2015ebha.confE..33G