On the nature of the variability power decay towards soft spectral states in X-ray binaries. Case study in Cyg X-1

Abstract

A characteristic feature of the Fourier Power Density Spectrum (PDS) observed from black hole X-ray binaries in low/hard and intermediate spectral states is a broad band-limited noise, characterized by a constant below some frequency (a ``break'' frequency) and a power law above this frequency. It has been shown that the variability of this type can be produced by the inward diffusion of the local driving perturbations in a bounded configuration (accretion disk or corona). In the framework of this model, the perturbation diffusion time t_0 is related to the phenomenological break frequency, while the PDS power-law slope above the ``break'' is determined by the viscosity distribution over the configuration. he perturbation diffusion scenario explains the decay of the power of X-ray variability observed in a number of compact sources (containing black hole and neutron star) during an evolution of theses sources from low/hard to high/soft states. We compare the model predictions with the subset of data from Cyg X-1 collected by the Rossi X-ray Time Explorer (RXTE). Our extensive analysis of the Cyg X-1 PDSs demonstrates that the observed integrated power P_x decreases approximately as a square root of the characteristic frequency of the driving oscillations \nu_{dr}. The RXTE observations of Cyg X-1 allow us to infer P_{dr} and t_0 as a function of \nu_{dr}. Using the inferred dependences of the integrated power of the driving oscillations P_{dr} and t_0 on \nu_{dr} we demonstrate that the power predicted by the model also decays as P_{x,diff} proportional to \nu_{dr}^{-0.5} that is similar to the observed P_{x} behavior.