Striped Blandford/Znajek jets from advection of small scale magnetic field

Abstract

Black hole - accretion disc systems are the central engines of relativistic jets from stellar to galactic scales. We numerically quantify the unsteady outgoing Poynting flux through the horizon of a rapidly spinning black hole endowed with a rotating accretion disc. The disc supports small-scale, concentric, flux tubes with zero net magnetic flux. Our General Relativistic force-free electrodynamics simulations follow the accretion onto the black hole over several hundred dynamical timescales in 3D. For the case of counter-rotating accretion discs, the average process efficiency reaches up to $\left\langleε\right\rangle\approx 0.43$, compared to a stationary energy extraction by the Blandford/Znajek process. The process efficiency depends on the cross-sectional area of the loops, i.e. on the product $l\times h$, where $l$ is the radial loop thickness and $h$ its vertical scale height. We identify a strong correlation between efficient electromagnetic energy extraction and the quasi-stationary setting of ideal conditions for the operation of the Blandford/Znajek process (e.g. optimal field line angular velocity and fulfillment of the so-called Znajek condition). Remarkably, the energy extraction operates intermittently (alternating episodes of high and low efficiency) without imposing any large-scale magnetic field embedding the central object. Scaling our results to supermassive black holes, we estimate that the typical variability timescale of the system is of the order of days to months. Such timescales may account for the longest variability scales of TeV emission observed, e.g. in M87.