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Electron Heating in Hot Accretion Flows

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Prateek Sharma1, Eliot Quataert1, Gregory W. Hammett2 and James M. Stone3

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Local (shearing box) simulations of the nonlinear evolution of the magnetorotational instability in a collisionless plasma show that angular momentum transport by pressure anisotropy (pbottomppar, where the directions are defined with respect to the local magnetic field) is comparable to that due to the Maxwell and Reynolds stresses. Pressure anisotropy, which is effectively a large-scale viscosity, arises because of adiabatic invariants related to pbottom and ppar in a fluctuating magnetic field. In a collisionless plasma, the magnitude of the pressure anisotropy, and thus the viscosity, is determined by kinetic instabilities at the cyclotron frequency. Our simulations show that ~50% of the gravitational potential energy is directly converted into heat at large scales by the viscous stress (the remaining energy is lost to grid-scale numerical dissipation of kinetic and magnetic energy). We show that electrons receive a significant fraction [~(Te/Ti)1/2] of this dissipated energy. Employing this heating by an anisotropic viscous stress in one-dimensional models of radiatively inefficient accretion flows, we find that the radiative efficiency of the flow is greater than 0.5% for img1.gif gtrsim 10-4img1.gifEdd. Thus, a low accretion rate, rather than just a low radiative efficiency, is necessary to explain the low luminosity of many accreting black holes. For Sgr A* in the Galactic center, our predicted radiative efficiencies imply an accretion rate of ≈3 × 10-8 Msun yr-1 and an electron temperature of ≈3 × 1010 K at ≈10 Schwarzschild radii; the latter is consistent with the brightness temperature inferred from VLBI observations.


Subject headings

accretion, accretion disks; Galaxy: center; MHD; plasmas


Dates

Issue 2 (2007 October 1)

Received 2007 March 20, accepted for publication 2007 June 11



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