Dark magnetohydrodynamics: Black hole accretion in superradiant dark photon clouds
Abstract
Black holes threaded by massive vector fields can be subject to a superradiant instability, growing a cloud of massive vector particles around it. In this work, we consider what happens if such a dark matter candidate field mimicking a dark photon interacts with an accretion flow onto the black hole. By including a kinetic mixing term with the standard model photon, we extend the commonly used equations of general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics to a dark photon constituent. The coupling to the dark photon then appears as an effective dynamo term together with a dark Lorentz force acting on the accreting matter. We numerically study the interactions between the superradiant dark photon cloud and the inner accretion flow by solving the coupled system in full numerical relativity. By parameterically varying the mixing parameter between dark and standard model sector, we provide a first investigation of how the accretion flow could be modified. Depending on the coupling strength, our solutions exhibit increased wind launching, as well as oscillation modes in the disk.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to W. East, J. Huang and A. Philippov for insightful discussions. Simulations were performed
on the Sherlock clusters at Stanford University. SX acknowledges support by US Department of Energy under contract DE–AC02–76SF00515. ERM acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under grants No. PHY-2309210 and AST-2307394, as well as on the NSF Frontera supercomputer under grant AST21006, and on Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) through allocation PHY210074 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.
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Additional details
- United States Department of Energy
- DE–AC02–76SF00515
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309210
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2307394
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, TAPIR
- Publication Status
- Submitted