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Speaker: Luciano Combi (Instituto Argentina de Radioastronomia, Rochester Institute of TechnologyI
Title: Accretion onto spinning supermassive black hole binaries
Abstract:
Massive binary black holes (MBBH) are expected to be in the gas-rich environment of galaxies and emit electromagnetic waves through accretion. At close separations, the dynamical spacetime and the non-linear behavior of the plasma make the system fairly complex. For this reason, numerical simulations are key tools to make accurate predictions of Its multi-messenger emission.

In this talk, we present an overview of recent results on general relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of accretion disks around supermassive black hole binaries. First, we introduce a new approximate metric representing two spinning black holes approaching merger. We use this metric to perform long-term simulations of circumbinary disks and mini-disks. We analyze the periodic behavior and orbital motion of the mini-disks, their interaction with the circumbinary disk, and the electromagnetic outflows produced by the black holes. These simulations constitute the first steps to modeling realistic lightcurves and spectra from MBBH with equal masses.