Magnetized Equilibrium Accretion Tori around Kerr Black Holes in General Relativistic Magneto-hydrodynamic Simulations

Accretion onto black holes is one of the most likely candidates for generating many of the high energy events observed in our universe, which include gamma ray bursts, active galactic nuclei, and X-ray binaries. Key to this process is the formation and dynamics of magnetized accretion disks. We have developed a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics code for studying such black hole accretion systems in global three dimensional simulations. This gives us the ability to study the non-axisymmetric instabilities of these systems that arise from the nonlinearity of the governing equations. Here, I will present recent results from simulations of a magnetized torus in equilibrium around a black hole on fixed spacetime backgrounds and give preliminary results studying the non-axisymmetric instabilities of the system.