Images of accretion discs - II. Doppler tomography

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Abstract
In an earlier paper a method was presented for imaging the continuum light of accretion discs from light curves of their eclipses. In this paper we present a related method for making two-dimensional maps of accretion discs in the light of their emission lines from observations of line profiles as a function of binary phase. Reconstructions of simulated datasets demonstrate the potential of the method. The maximum entropy method picks a single image from the set allowed by the statistical noise in the data. The method can accurately reproduce compact ‘S’-waves produced by asymmetric emission patterns and should be a powerful tool for the interpretation of the complex line variations seen in the spectra of cataclysmic variable stars.

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