Investigating the X-ray polarization of lamp-post coronae in BHXRBs
Zhang, Wenda; Dovčiak, Michal; Bursa, Michal; Karas, Vladimír; Matt, Giorgio; Ursini, Francesco
September 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 515, Issue 2, pp.2882-2889
High-sensitivity X-ray polarimetric observations of black hole X-ray binaries, which will soon become available with the launches of space-borne X-ray observatories with sensitive X-ray polarimeters, will be able to put independent constraints on the black hole as well as the accretion flow, and possibly break degeneracies that cannot be resolved by spectral/timing observations alone. In this work, we perform a series of general relativistic Monte Carlo radiative transfer simulations to study the expected polarization properties of X-ray radiation emerging from lamp-post coronae in black hole X-ray binaries. We find that the polarization degree of the coronal emission of black hole X-ray binaries is sensitive to the spin of the black hole, the height of the corona, and the dynamics of the corona.
