Rapid Black Hole Spin-down by Thick Magnetically Arrested Disks

Abstract

Black hole (BH) spin can play an important role in galaxy evolution by controlling the amount of energy and momentum ejected from near the BH into the surroundings. We focus on radiatively-inefficient and geometrically-thick magnetically-arrested disks (MADs) that can launch strong BH-powered jets. With an appropriately chosen adiabatic index, these systems can describe either the low-luminosity or highly super-Eddington BH accretion regimes. Using a suite of 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations, we find that for any initial spin, a MAD rapidly spins down the BH to the equilibrium spin of $0< a_{\rm eq} \lesssim 0.1$, very low compared to $a_{\rm eq} = 1$ for the standard thin luminous (Novikov-Thorne) disks. This implies that rapidly accreting (super-Eddington) BHs fed by MADs tend to lose most of their rotational energy to magnetized relativistic outflows. In a MAD, a BH only needs to accrete $20\%$ of its own mass to spin down from $a=1$ to $a=0.2$. We construct a semi-analytic model of BH spin evolution in MADs by taking into account the torques on the BH due to both the hydrodynamic disk and electromagnetic jet components, and find that the low value of $a_{\rm eq} $ is due to both the jets slowing down the BH rotation and the disk losing a large fraction of its angular momentum to outflows. Our results have crucial implications for how BH spins evolve in active galaxies and other systems such as collapsars, where BH spin-down timescale can be short enough to significantly affect the evolution of gamma-ray emitting BH-powered jets.