General relativistic two-temperature accretion solutions for spherical flows around black holes

Abstract

Matter falling onto black holes is hot, fully ionized and has to be necessarily transonic. Since the electrons are responsible for radiative cooling via processes like synchrotron, bremsstrahlung and inverse-Compton, the electron gas and proton gas are supposed to settle into two separate temperature distribution. But the problem with two-temperature flow is that there is one more variable than the number of equations. Accretion flow in its simplest form is radial, which has two constants of motion, while the flow variables are the radial bulk three-velocity, electron and proton temperatures. Therefore, unlike single temperature flow, in the two-temperature regime, there are multiple transonic solutions, nonunique for any given set of constants of motion with a large variation in sonic points. We invoked the second law of thermodynamics to find a possible way to break the degeneracy, by showing only one of the solutions among all possible, has maximum entropy and therefore is the correct solution. By considering these correct solutions, we showed that the accretion efficiency increase with the increase in the mass accretion rate. We showed that radial flow onto super-massive black hole can radiate with efficiency more than 10%, if the accretion rate is more than 60% of the Eddington accretion rate, but accretion onto stellar-mass black hole achieve the same efficiency, when it is close to the Eddington limit. We also showed that dissipative heat quantitatively affects the two temperature solution. In the presence of explicit heat processes, the Coulomb coupling is weak.