Hot tori around black holes as sources of gamma ray bursts

Abstract

We investigate the configurations consisting of massive, dense and hot tori around stellar mass Kerr black holes as possible sources of energy for the gamma ray bursts in cosmological hypothesis of their origin. We limit parameters of our models to the values resulting from neutron stars merger calculations or suggested in the ``failed supernova'' scenario. We investigate models with different angular momentum distributions and different specific entropies. We construct also approximate evolutionary tracks of our systems postulating some viscosity mechanism to be present. We find, that models resulting from a merger of two neutron stars give too little energy to be likely sources of gamma ray bursts. This conclusion remains true despite the artificially high values of specific entropy and viscosity, which we use in our calculations. The promising models should contain a high angular momentum black hole ($a \sim 1$) and/or a torus with almost constant specific angular momentum. The configurations resulting from a collapse of rapidly rotating WR stars are not excluded as sources of the bursts due to a greater freedom in choosing their initial parameters.