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Tom Man Kwan

Publications and source records attributed to Tom Man Kwan.

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Strongly Magnetized Super-Eddington Accretion: How Spin and Accretion Rate Regulate Energy Output and Mass Loss

Strongly magnetized super-Eddington accretion flows power many important astrophysical systems, but how black hole parameters control their output is unclear. We present 32 general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of super-Eddington magnetically arrested disks onto stellar-mass black holes, varying mass ($M_{\rm BH}= 5, 15, 30\,M_{\odot}$), spin ($a=0,0.9$), and accretion rate ($\dot{M}_{\rm acc} \approx 1-2000\,\dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$). We find that black hole spin and accretion rate jointly regulate wind loss rates and energy output efficiencies, while black hole mass has no effect over the mass range studied here. The BH accretes only $10-40\%$ of the mass supplied to the accretion flow, while the rest is expelled in winds. This accretion fraction decreases with mass supply rate and is lower for high-spin systems. Both spin states produce strong magnetically driven outflows. For $a = 0$, the wind kinetic, radiative, and electromagnetic efficiencies are modest and show little variation across the full simulated range of accretion rates. For $a = 0.9$, both wind power and jet power increase super-linearly with $\dot{M}_{\rm acc}$, with the jet power saturating beyond $\dot{M}_{\rm acc} \sim 100\,\dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$. Radiation is strongly beamed along the funnel, with inverse beaming factors exceeding $100$ for high-spin, high-$\dot{m}$ models viewed face-on. Our results establish that rapid BH spin boosts energy-extraction efficiency, while high accretion rate amplifies total power. We provide scaling relations for luminosities, jet power, accretion ratio, and beaming, offering a framework for interpreting observations of ULXs and other super-Eddington systems.

astro-ph.HE

Diverse Emission Patterns from Precessing Super-Eddington Disks Formed in Tidal Disruption Events

A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star passes within the tidal radius of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). In TDEs it is expected that the orbital angular momentum of the disrupted star is generally misaligned with the SMBH spin axis, which should result in a misaligned super-Eddington disk precessing around the SMBH spin axis due to the Lense-Thirring effect. In this paper, we investigate the distinct observational signatures produced from such TDE disks, by performing radiative transfer calculations upon previous super-Eddington disk simulations. We demonstrate that the precession of the disk and wind drive time-dependent obscuration and reprocessing of X-ray radiation. Depending on the orientation of the viewing angle of the observer and the tilt angle of the disk, four main types of variability are induced: 1) The smooth-TDEs: The emissions from these TDEs show no fluctuations; 2) The dimmer: The main emission type (X-ray or optical) stays the same, with small to moderate modulations of brightness; 3) The blinker: X-ray and optical emissions take turns to dominate in one cycle of precession, with dramatic changes in the X-ray fluxes. 4) The siren: X-ray and optical emissions take over each other twice per cycle, possibly with two different peak X-ray fluxes within one cycle. In all three scenarios, we observe an inverse correlation between X-ray and optical emissions. Our model provides a physical framework for interpreting TDE multi-wavelength variability through disk precession dynamics and gives an alternative interpretation to the interesting case of J045650.3-203750 which was suggested to be a repeated partial TDE previously.

astro-ph.HE