Testing the disk-corona interplay in radiatively-efficient broad-line AGN

Abstract

The correlation observed between monochromatic X-ray and UV luminosities in radiatively-efficient active galactic nuclei (AGN) lacks a clear theoretical explanation despite being used for many applications. Such a correlation, with its small intrinsic scatter and its slope that is smaller than unity in log space, represents the compelling evidence that a mechanism regulating the energetic interaction between the accretion disk and the X-ray corona must be in place. This ensures that going from fainter to brighter sources the coronal emission increases less than the disk emission. We discuss here a self-consistently coupled disk-corona model that can identify this regulating mechanism in terms of modified viscosity prescriptions in the accretion disk. The model predicts a lower fraction of accretion power dissipated in the corona for higher accretion states. We then present a quantitative observational test of the model using a reference sample of broad-line AGN and modeling the disk-corona emission for each source in the $L_X-L_{UV}$ plane. We used the slope, normalization, and scatter of the observed relation to constrain the parameters of the theoretical model. For non-spinning black holes and static coronae, we find that the accretion prescriptions that match the observed slope of the $L_X-L_{UV}$ relation produce X-rays that are too weak with respect to the normalization of the observed relation. Instead, considering moderately-outflowing Comptonizing coronae and/or a more realistic high-spinning black hole population significantly relax the tension between the strength of the observed and modeled X-ray emission, while also predicting very low intrinsic scatter in the $L_X-L_{UV}$ relation. In particular, this latter scenario traces a known selection effect of flux-limited samples that preferentially select high-spinning, hence brighter, sources.