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Relativistic Particle Transport In Hot Accretion Disks, P. A. Becker, Menas Kafatos, M. Maisack

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Accretion disks around rapidly rotating black holes provide one of the few plausible models for the production of intense radiation in AGNs above energies of several hundred MeV. The rapid rotation of the hole increases the binding energy per nucleon in the last stable orbit relative to the Schwarzschild case, and naturally leads to ion temperatures in the range 10^12-10^13 K for sub-Eddington accretion rates. The protons in the hot inner region of a steady, two-temperature disk form a reservoir of energy that is sufficient to power the observed EGRET outbursts if the black hole mass is 10^10 M0 • …