Absorption lines from magnetically-driven winds in X-ray binaries

Séminaire IPAG de Susmita Chakravorty (IPAG), jeudi 31 mars 2016 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

High resolution X-ray spectra of black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) show blueshifted absorption lines from disk winds which seem to be equatorial. Winds occur in the Softer (disk-dominated) states of the outburst and are less prominent or absent in the Harder (power-law dominated) states. We use self-similar magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) accretion-ejection models to explain the disk winds in BHBs. In our models, the density at the base of the outflow from the accretion disk is not a free parameter, but is determined by solving the full set of dynamical MHD equations. Thus the physical properties of the outflow are controlled by the global structure of the disk. We studied different MHD solutions characterized by different values of (a) the disk aspect ratio (ε) and (b) the ejection efficiency (p). We use two kinds of MHD solutions depending on the absence (cold solution) or presence (warm solution) of heating at the disk surface. Such heating could be from e.g. dissipation of energy due to MHD turbulence in the disk or from illumination. We use each of these MHD solutions to predict the physical parameters of an outflow ; put limits on the ionization parameter (ξ), column density and timescales, motivated by observational results ; and thus select regions within the outflow which are consistent with the observed winds. The cold MHD solutions cannot account for winds due to their low ejection efficiency. But warm solutions can explain the observed physical quantities in the wind because they can have sufficiently high values of p (≳0.1, implying larger mass loading at the base of the outflow). Further from our thermodynamic equilibrium curve analysis for the outflowing gas, we found that in the Hard state a range of ξ is thermodynamically unstable, and had to be excluded. This constrain made it impossible to have any wind at all, in the Hard state.