Ringed accretion disks: equilibrium configurations

Abstract: We investigate a model of ringed accretion disk, made up by several rings rotating around a supermassive Kerr black hole attractor. Each toroid of the ringed disk is governed by the General Relativity hydrodynamic Boyer condition of equilibrium configurations of rotating perfect fluids. Properties of the tori can be then determined by an appropriately defined effective potential reflecting the background Kerr geometry and the centrifugal effects. The ringed disks could be created in various regimes during the evolution of matter configurations around supermassive black holes. Therefore, both corotating and counterrotating rings have to be considered as being a constituent of the ringed disk. We provide constraints on the model parameters for the existence and stability of various ringed configurations and discuss occurrence of accretion onto the Kerr black hole and possible launching of jets from the ringed disk. We demonstrate that various ringed disks can be characterized by a maximum number of rings. We present also a perturbation analysis based on evolution of the oscillating components of the ringed disk. The dynamics of the unstable phases of the ringed disk evolution seems to be promising in relation to high energy phenomena demonstrated in active galactic nuclei.