Magnetic Flux Transport in Radiatively Inefficient Accretion Flows and the Pathway towards a Magnetically Arrested Disk

Abstract

Large-scale magnetic fields play a vital role in determining the angular momentum transport and in generating jets/outflows in the accreting systems, yet their origin remains poorly understood. We focus on radiatively inefficient accretion flows (RIAF) around the black holes, and conduct three-dimensional general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations using the Athena++ code. We first re-confirm that the dynamo action alone cannot provide sufficient magnetic flux required to produce a strong jet. We next investigate the other possibility, where the large-scale magnetic fields are advected inward from external sources (e.g. the companion star in X-ray binaries, magnetized ambient medium in AGNs). Although the actual configuration of the external fields could be complex and uncertain, they are likely to be closed. As a first study, we treat them as closed field loops of different sizes, shapes and field strengths. Unlike earlier studies of flux transport, where magnetic flux is injected in the initial laminar flow, we injected the magnetic field loops in the quasi-stationary turbulent RIAF in inflow equilibrium and followed their evolution. We found that a substantial fraction (∼ 15% − 40%) of the flux injected at the large radii reaches the black hole with a weak dependence on the loop parameters except when the loops are injected at high latitudes, away from the mid-plane. Relatively high efficiency of flux transport observed in our study hints that a magnetically dominated RIAF, potentially a magnetically-arrested disk, might be formed relatively easily close to the black hole, provided that a source of the large-scale field exists at the larger radii.