Today we had the outstanding MsC defense of Pedro Naethe Motta, entitled “GRMHD simulations of X-ray binaries in the hard state“. There is a lot to unpack here: GRMHD stands for general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic, a technique used by astrophysicists to simulate the motion of plasmas in curved spacetimes.
In this work, Pedro presented a new, computationally efficient method for modeling the radiation processes in black hole X-ray binaries (XRBs), developed using a feature of GPUs called texture memory instead of lookup tables or directly solving the cooling equations. In the dissertation, Pedro extensively tested the new approach and implemented it in the H-AMR GRMHD code. This new approach can be quite useful for studying accretion flows around stellar-mass black holes.
During his masters, Pedro spent five months visiting our collaborator Sasha Tchekhovskoy at Northwestern University who is one of the main groups developing and using H-AMR.
Stay tuned for a paper reporting the results of this work!
Black Hole Group 