Hot accretion discs with advection

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Abstract
The global structure of optically thin, hot accretion disc models, including radial advection, has been investigated. We solve the full energy conservation equation explicitly and construct a model of the radial structure of the disc. It is found that advection is a cooling process and that two solutions co-exist for a given mass accretion rate that is below a critical limit. One is fully advection-cooling dominated and the other is dominated by local radiative cooling. The accretion discs that are dominated by advection cooling are hotter than the discs dominated by local cooling; they are most probably in the two-temperature regime, and effects such as electron-positron pair production and annihilation may need to be considered to study the microphysics of the hot plasma. However, the global disc structure will not be much affected by the local radiative process.

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