New Spectral State of Supercritical Accretion Flow with Comptonizing Outflow

Supercritical accretion flows inevitably produce radiation-pressure driven outflows, which Compton up-scatter soft photons from the underlying accretion flow, thereby making hard emission. We performed two-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations of supercritical accretion flows and outflows, while incorporating such Compton scattering effects, and demonstrated that there appears a new hard spectral state at higher photon luminosities than that of the slim-disk state. In this state, as the photon luminosity increases, the photon index decreases and the fraction of the hard emission increases. The Compton v-parameter is on the order of unity (and thus the photon index will be similar to 2) when the apparent photon luminosity is similar to 30 L-E (with L-E being the Eddington luminosity) for nearly face-on sources. This explains the observed spectral hardening of the ULX NGC 1313 X-2 in its brightening phase, and thus supports the model of supercritical accretion onto stellar-mass black holes in this ULX.