Papers › Testing the disk-corona interplay in radiatively-efficient broad-line AGN
Testing the disk-corona interplay in radiatively-efficient broad-line AGN
Riccardo Arcodia, Andrea Merloni, Kirpal Nandra, Gabriele Ponti
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The correlation observed between monochromatic X-ray and UV luminosities in radiatively-efficient active galactic nuclei (AGN) lacks a clear theoretical explanation despite being used for many applications. Such a correlation, with its small intrinsic scatter and its slope that is smaller than unity in log space, represents the compelling evidence that a mechanism regulating the energetic interaction between the accretion disk and the X-ray corona must be in place. This ensures that going from fainter to brighter sources the coronal emission increases less than the disk emission. We discuss here a self-consistently coupled disk-corona model that can identify this regulating mechanism in terms of modified viscosity prescriptions in the accretion disk. The model predicts a lower fraction of accretion power dissipated in the corona for higher accretion states. We then present a quantitative observational test of the model using a reference sample of broad-line AGN and modeling the disk-corona emission for each source in the L_X-L_(UV) plane. We used the slope, normalization, and scatter of the observed relation to constrain the parameters of the theoretical model. For non-spinning black holes and static coronae, we find that the accretion prescriptions that match the observed slope of the L_X-L_(UV) relation produce X-rays that are too weak with respect to the normalization of the observed relation. Instead, considering moderately-outflowing Comptonizing coronae and/or a more realistic high-spinning black hole population significantly relax the tension between the strength of the observed and modeled X-ray emission, while also predicting very low intrinsic scatter in the L_X-L_(UV) relation. In particular, this latter scenario traces a known selection effect of flux-limited samples that preferentially select high-spinning, hence brighter, sources.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections