A Circumbinary Disk Model for the Rapid Orbital Shrinkage in Black Hole Low-Mass X-ray Binaries

Abstract

Several black hole low-mass X-ray binaries (BHLMXBs) show very fast orbital shrinkage, which is difficult to understand in the standard picture of the LMXB evolution. Based on the possible detection of a circumbinary (CB) disk in A0620-00 and XTE J1118+480, we investigate the influence of the interaction between a CB disk and the inner binary and calculate the evolution of the binary using the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics. We consider two cases for the CB disk formation in which it is fed by mass loss during single outburst or successive outbursts in the LMXB. We show that when taking reasonable values of the initial mass and the dissipating time of the disk, it is possible to explain the fast orbital shrinkage in the BHLMXBs without invoking high mass transfer rate.