Dissipation Physics and Absorption Features in Black Hole X-ray Binaries

As matter falls closer toward the center of the accretion disk it loses gravitational potential energy and becomes radiation primarily in X-ray wavelengths. We use accretion disk models based on data collected from black hole X-ray systems such as GX 339-4 and LMC-X3. These simulations often show spectra that predict relativistically smeared absorption features that are not present in the observational data. Informed by recent local and global simulations, we conduct new disk structure and radiative transfer calculations with increased dissipation rates of gravitational potential energy into thermal energy in disk upper layers. We find a noticeable reduction of the absorption features compared to older models that did not incorporate simulation-based dissipation physics. This leads us to better approximations of accretion disk features, which, when incorporating relativistic transfer effects, will tell us what an observer from earth (or other extreme distances) should see.