The black hole accretion code

By Oliver Porth, H. Olivares, Yosuke Mizuno, Z. Younsi, Luciano Rezzolla, M. Mościbrodzka, Heino Falcke, Michael Kramer. 2016

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the black hole accretion code (BHAC), a new multidimensional general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics module for the MPI-AMRVAC framework. BHAC has been designed to solve the equations of ideal general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics in arbitrary spacetimes and exploits adaptive mesh refinement techniques with an efficient block-based approach. Several spacetimes have already been implemented and tested. We demonstrate the validity of BHAC by means of various one-, two-, and three-dimensional test problems, as well as through a close comparison with the HARM3D code in the case of a torus accreting onto a black hole. The convergence of a turbulent accretion scenario is investigated with several diagnostics and we find accretion rates and horizon-penetrating fluxes to be convergent to within a few percent when the problem is run in three dimensions. Our analysis also involves the study of the corresponding thermal synchrotron emission, which is performed by means of a new general-relativistic radiative transfer code, BHOSS. The resulting synthetic intensity maps of accretion onto black holes are found to be convergent with increasing resolution and are anticipated to play a crucial role in the interpretation of horizon-scale images resulting from upcoming radio observations of the source at the Galactic Center.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c90cf8e066c40e7edaf5dfc9b991f4bca180406

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Citations in the corpus

The Event Horizon General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Code Comparison Project (2019, methodology): “BHAC has been designed to solve the equations of GRMHD in arbitrary spacetimes/coordinates and exploits adaptive mesh refinement techniques with an oct-tree block-based approach.”
Magnetic Reconnection and Hot Spot Formation in Black Hole Accretion Disks (2020, methodology): “…al. 2019c) to capture fast reconnection dynamics, together with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) capabilities of the Black Hole Accretion Code (BHAC, Porth et al. 2017; Olivares et al. 2019) to accurately resolve the smallest scales in the system allows us to study resistive reconnection and…”
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring (2019, unknown): “The distribution of M/D for the best-fit 10% of snapshots is qualitatively similar if we include only MAD or SANE models, only models produced by individual codes (BHAC, 116 Paper I and Paper IV focus instead on the April 11 data set.”
IPOLE - semi-analytic scheme for relativistic polarized radiative transport (2017, methodology): “We can therefore study polarization properties of non-GR black hole models, and switch to unconventional coordinate systems (such as the Cartesian Kerr-Schild coordinates used by, e.g., BHAC code, Porth et al. 2017) for the geodesic integration.”
First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Testing Astrophysical Models of the Galactic Center Black Hole (2022, methodology): “We integrate the GRMHD equations in three spatial dimensions using multiple algorithms: KHARMA (Prather et al. 2021), BHAC (Porth et al. 2017; Olivares et al. 2019), HAMR (Liska et al. 2019), koral (Sądowski et al. 2013), and Athena++ (White et al. 2016); see Porth et al. (2019) and H. Olivares et…”
The Athena++ Adaptive Mesh Refinement Framework: Design and Magnetohydrodynamic Solvers (2020, methodology): “…(Teyssier 2002; Lamberts et al. 2012) uses a modified enthalpy-based method from Mignone & McKinney (2007), PLUTO (Mignone et al. 2007; Mignone 2014) uses the enthalpy-based 1D method of Mignone & Bodo (2006), and BHAC uses both an enthalpy-based 1D method and a 2D method (Porth et al. 2017).”
The current ability to test theories of gravity with black hole shadows (2018, background): “(4) and (5) vanish by construction), and the line element recovers the Schwarzschild metric.”