A Study of a Tilted Thin Inner Accretion Disk around a Spinning Black Hole

Abstract

The inner part of a thin accretion disk around a Kerr black hole can serve as an important tool to study the physics of the strong gravity regime. A tilt in such a disk with respect to the black hole spin axis is particularly useful for this purpose, as such a tilt can have a significant effect on the observed X-ray spectral and timing features via Lense–Thirring precession. However, the inner disk has been predicted to become aligned with the spin direction of the black hole by the well-known Bardeen–Petterson effect. Here we calculate, both analytically and numerically, the radial profile of the thin accretion disk tilt angle in the viscous regime (i.e., α is the Shakura–Sunyaev viscosity parameter, H is the disk thickness, and R is the radial distance). We show that the inner disk may not be aligned at all for certain reasonable ranges of parameter values. This makes the inner accretion disk particularly promising to probe the black hole parameters, and the accretion process in the strong gravity region.