Xue-Bing Wu

Modeling the Hard States of XTE J1550–564 during Its 2000 Outburst

We study the hard states of the black hole binary XTE J1550-564 during its 2000 outburst. In order to explain those states at their highest luminosities, L similar to 10% of the Eddington luminosity, L-E, we propose a specific hot accretion flow model. We point out that the highest values of the hard-state L are substantially above the L that an advection-dominated accretion flow can produce, similar to 0.4 alpha L-2(E), which is only similar to 3%-4% of L-E even for alpha as high as 0.3. On the other hand, we successfully explain the hard states with L similar to 0.04-0.10 using the luminous hot accretion flow (LHAF) model. As 0.10L(E) is also roughly the highest luminosity an LHAF can produce, such agreement between the predicted and observed highest luminosities itself provides strong support for this model. We then study multiwaveband spectral variability during the 2000 outburst. In addition to the primary maxima in the optical light curves, secondary maxima were detected after the transition from the very high state to the hard state. We show that the secondary maxima are well modeled as synchrotron emission from a jet formed during the state transition. We argue that the absence of a corresponding secondary peak in the X-ray light curve indicates that the X-ray jet emission, regardless of its radiative process, synchrotron or Comptonization, is not important in the hard state as compared with the emission from the accretion flow.

THE CORRELATIONS BETWEEN OPTICAL VARIABILITY AND PHYSICAL PARAMETERS OF QUASARS IN SDSS STRIPE 82

We investigate the optical variability of 7658 quasars from SDSS Stripe 82. Taking advantage of a larger sample and relatively more data points for each quasar, we estimate variability amplitudes and divide the sample into small bins of redshift, rest-frame wavelength, black hole mass, Eddington ratio, and bolometric luminosity, respectively, to investigate the relationships between variability and these parameters. An anti-correlation between variability and rest-frame wavelength is found. The variability amplitude of radio-quiet quasars shows almost no cosmological evolution, but that of radio-loud ones may weakly anti-correlate with redshift. In addition, variability increases as either luminosity or Eddington ratio decreases. However, the relationship between variability and black hole mass is uncertain; it is negative when the influence of Eddington ratio is excluded, but positive when the influence of luminosity is excluded. The intrinsic distribution of variability amplitudes for radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars are different. Both radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars exhibit a bluer-when-brighter chromatism. Assuming that quasar variability is caused by variations of accretion rate, the Shakura-Sunyaev disk model can reproduce the tendencies of observed correlations between variability and rest-frame wavelength, luminosity as well as Eddington ratio, supporting that changes of accretion rate play an important role in producing the observed optical variability. However, the predicted positive correlation between variability and black hole mass seems to be inconsistent with the observed negative correlation between them in small bins of Eddington ratio, which suggests that other physical mechanisms may still need to be considered in modifying the simple accretion disk model.

The Black Hole Fundamental Plane from a Uniform Sample of Radio and X-Ray-emitting Broad-Line AGNs

We derived the black hole fundamental plane relationship between the 1.4 GHz radio luminosity (Lr), 0.1-2.4 keV X-ray luminosity (LX), and black hole mass (M) from a uniform broad-line SDSS AGN sample including both radio-loud and radio-quiet X-ray-emitting sources. We found in our sample that the fundamental plane relation has a very weak dependence on the black hole mass, and a tight correlation also exists between the Eddington-luminosity-scaled X-ray and radio luminosities for the radio-quiet subsample. In addition, we noticed that the radio-quiet and radio-loud AGNs have different power-law slopes in the radio-X-ray nonlinear relationship. The radio-loud sample displays a slope of 1.39, which seems consistent with the jet-dominated X-ray model. However, it may also be partly due to the relativistic beaming effect. For the radio-quiet sample the slope of the radio-X-ray relationship is about 0.85, which is possibly consistent with the theoretical prediction from the accretion-flow-dominated X-ray model. We briefly discuss the reason why our derived relationship is different from some previous works and expect the future spectral studies in radio and X-ray bands on individual sources in our sample to confirm our result.

The Black Hole Fundamental Plane: Revisited with a Larger Sample of Radio and X-Ray-Emitting Broad-Line AGNs

We use a recently released SDSS catalog of X-ray-emitting AGNs in conjunction with the FIRST radio survey to investigate the black hole (BH) fundamental plane relationship between the 1.4 GHz radio luminosity ( -->Lr), 0.1-2.4 keV X-ray luminosity ( -->LX), and black hole mass ( -->M), namely, -->log Lr = ξRXlog LX + ξRMlog M + constant . For this purpose, we compile a large sample of 725 broad-line AGNs, which consists of 498 radio-loud sources and 227 radio-quiet sources. We confirm that radio-loud objects have a steeper slope ( -->ξRX) with respect to radio-quiet objects and that the dependence of the BH fundamental plane on the BH mass ( -->ξRM) is weak. We also find tight correlation with a similar slope between the soft X-ray luminosity and broad emission-line luminosity for both radio-loud and radio-quiet AGNs, which implies that their soft X-ray emission is unbeamed and probably related to the accretion process. With the current larger sample, we find that there is no clear evidence of evolution for radio-quiet AGNs, while for radio-loud ones there is a weak trend in which -->ξRM decreases as the redshift increases. This may be understood in part as due to the observed evolution of the radio spectral index as a function of redshift. Finally, we discuss the relativistic beaming effect and other uncertainties related to the BH fundamental plane. We conclude that, although it does introduce scatter into the fundamental plane relation, Doppler boosting alone is not enough to explain the observed steeper value of -->ξRX in the radio-loud subsample with respect to the radio-quiet ones.

Supermassive black hole masses of AGNs with elliptical hosts

The recently discovered tight correlation between supermassive black hole mass and central velocity dispersion for both inactive and active galaxies suggests a possibility to estimate the black hole mass from the measured central velocity dispersion. However, for most AGNs it is difficult to measure the central velocity dispersions of their host galaxies directly with spectroscopic studies. In this paper we adopt the fundamental plane for ellipticals to estimate the central velocity dispersion and black hole mass for a number of AGNs with morphology parameters of their elliptical host galaxies obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope imaging observations. The estimated black hole masses of 63 BL Lac objects, 10 radio galaxies, 10 radio-loud quasars and 9 radio-quiet quasars are mostly in the range of

Quasar candidate selection and photometric redshift estimation based on SDSS and UKIDSS data

10^{7.5}~M_\odot

Inclinations and black hole masses of Seyfert 1 galaxies

to

ON THE STRUCTURE OF ACCRETION DISKS WITH OUTFLOWS

10^{9}~ M_\odot

Estimating Black Hole Masses of AGNs using Ultraviolet Emission Line Properties

. No significant difference in black hole mass is found for high-frequency peaked BL Lacs and low-frequency peaked BL Lacs, as well as for radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars. The Eddington ratios of radio galaxies are substantially smaller than those of quasars. This suggests that the different observational features of these radio-loud AGNs may be mainly dominated by different accretion rate rather than by the black hole mass, which is in agreement with some evolutionary scenarios recently proposed for radio-loud AGNs. Different to some previous claims, we found that the derived mean black hole mass for radio-loud quasars is only slightly larger than that of radio-quiet quasars. Though the black hole mass distributions between radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars are statistically different, their Eddington ratio distributions are probably from the same population. In addition, we noted that the relation between black hole mass and host galaxy luminosity we obtained using the fundamental plane provides further arguments for a nonlinear scaling law between supermassive black hole mass and galactic bulge mass.

Accretion Disk Spectra of the Brightest Ultraluminous X-Ray Source in M82

We present a sample of 8498 quasars with both SDSS ugriz optical and UKIDSS Y JHK near-IR photometric data. With this sample, we obtain the median colour-z relations based on 7400 quasars with magnitude uncertainties less than 0.1mag in all bands. By analyzing the quasar colours, we propose an empirical criterion in the Y K vs. g z colour-colour diagram to separate stars and quasars with redshift z < 4, and two other criteria for selecting high redshift quasars. Using the SDSS-UKIDSS colourz relations, we estimate the photometric redshifts of 8498 SDSS-UKIDSS quasars, and find that 85.0% of them are consistent with the spectroscopic redshifts within |�z| < 0.2, which leads to a significant increase of the photometric redshift accuracy than that based on the SDSS colour-z relations only. As two tests, we compare our colour selection criterion with a small UKIDSS/EDR quasar/star sample and a sample of 4671 variable sources in the SDSS Stripe 82 region with both SDSS and UKIDSS data. We find that they can be clearly divided into two classes (quasars and stars) by our criterion in the Y K vs. g z plot. We select 3834 quasar candidates from the variable sources with g < 20.5 in Stripe 82, 826 of them being SDSS quasars and the rest without SDSS spectroscopy. We estimate the photometric redshifts for 3519 quasar candidates with all UKIDSS Y JHK data and find an accuracy of 87.5% within |�z| < 0.2 with the spectroscopic redshifts of 819 SDSS-UKIDSS identified quasars among them. We demonstrate that even at the same spectroscopy limit as SDSS, with our criterion we can at least partially recover the missing quasars with z � 2.7 in SDSS. The SDSS identified quasars only take a small fraction (21.5%) of our quasar candidates selected from the variable sources in Stripe 82, indicating that a deeper spectroscopy is very promising in producing a much larger sample of quasars than SDSS. The implications of our current results to the future Chinese LAMOST quasar survey are also discussed.