2023/03/27 by Jordy Davelaar, Davelaar, Jordy, Benjamin R. Ryan +13 · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Mechanics and Biomechanics Studies #Scientific Measurement and Uncertainty Evaluation
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.15522
openalex publication_date 2023/03/27 · openalex created_date 2023/03/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei are strong sources of X-ray emission produced by Compton scattering originating from the accretion flows surrounding their supermassive black holes. The shape and energy of the resulting spectrum depend on the shape of the underlying electron distribution function (DF). In this work, we present an extended version of the grmonty code, called κmonty. The grmonty code previously only included a thermal Maxwell Jütner electron distribution function. We extend the gromty code with non-thermal electron DFs, namely the κ and power-law DFs, implement Cartesian Kerr-Schild coordinates, accelerate the code with MPI, and couple the code to the non-uniform AMR grid data from the GRMHD code BHAC. For the Compton scattering process, we derive two sampling kernels for both distribution functions. Finally, we present a series of code tests to verify the accuracy of our schemes. The implementation of non-thermal DFs opens the possibility of studying the effect of non-thermal emission on previously developed black hole accretion models.