Lunch talk on Feb. 24, 2025

Modeling X-ray emission of accreting black holes with Monk

Speaker: Wenda Zhang (NAOC)

Venue: SWIFAR Building 2111

Time: 12:45 PM, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025

Abstract: 

Monk is a Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code that includes all general relativistic effects (Zhang et al. 2019). Basically, Monk samples photons from several emission processes (blackbody, bremsstrahlung, synchrotron, power-law, etc.), and ray-traces the emitted photons along null geodesics in the Kerr spacetime. Monk takes into account various interactions between the medium and the photons, including Compton scattering, bremsstrahlung self-absorption, and synchrotron self-absorption. Monk also supports transportation of the polarization vector in the curved spacetime. With Monk, we are able to compute the energy spectra, polarization, and lightcurves of accreting BHs as well as accreting NSs, for arbitrary geometry and physical conditions of the accretion flow. In this talk, I will give an short introduction to Monk, and then present a few results obtained with Monk.

Report PPT:  SWIFAR_Wenda Zhang.pptx