ZIJI: a model to calculate X-ray spectra of black hole X-ray binaries

Temurbek Mirzaev, Cosimo Bambi, Askar B. Abdikamalov, Jiachen Jiang, Honghui Liu, Shafqat Riaz, Swarnim Shashank

Published 2024-06-03Version 1

In the disk-corona model, the X-ray spectrum of a stellar-mass black hole in an X-ray binary is characterized by three components: a thermal component from a thin and cold accretion disk, a Comptonized component from a hot corona, and a reflection component produced by illumination of the cold disk by the hot corona. In this paper, we present ZIJI, which is a model to calculate the X-ray spectrum of black hole X-ray binaries in the disk-corona model. The accretion disk is described by the Novikov-Thorne model. The reflection spectrum is produced by the direct radiation from the corona as well as by the returning radiation of the thermal and reflection components and is calculated considering the actual spectrum illuminating the disk. If we turn the corona off, the reflection spectrum is completely generated by the returning radiation of the thermal component, as it may happen for some sources in soft spectral states. The user decides the radial density profile of the accretion disk and the ionization parameter is calculated self-consistently at any radial coordinate of the disk from the illuminating X-ray flux and the local electron density. We show the predictions of ZIJI in different regimes. We discuss current limitations of our model as well as the next steps to improve it.