Abstract

The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole provides a unique opportunity for us to study accretion physics around black holes. During a tidal disruption event (TDE), the rate of stellar debris supplied to the black hole can vary from two orders above the Eddington accretion rate to sub-Eddington within a year. This allows us to use TDEs to study super-Eddington accretion disk physics, as well as to probe the transition between the super-Eddington thick disk regime and the thin disk regime. In this talk, I will present our latest general-relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of super-Eddington accretion disks, and show how we can use these results to understand the evolution of disks, winds, jets and emissions in TDEs. I will also talk about our theoretical modeling of X-ray reflection from these simulated super-Eddington accretion disks.