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Alignment physics of disks warped by Lense–Thirring precession

Accretion disks occur in a wide variety of astrophysical contexts, from planet formation to accretion onto black holes. For simplicity, they are generally imagined as thin and flat. However, whenever the diskʼs angular momentum is oblique to the angular momentum of the central object(s), a torque causes rings within the disk to precess, twisting and warping it. Because the torque weakens rapidly with increasing radius, it has long been thought that some unspecified ‘friction’ brings the inner portions of such disks into alignment, while the outer parts remain in their original orientation. Nearly all previous work on this topic has assumed that such a diskʼs internal stresses can be described by an isotropic viscosity, even though it has been known for more than four decades that fluid viscosity is far too weak to be significant in accretion disks, and for two decades that accretion stresses are actually due to anisotropic MHD turbulence. This paper reviews recent numerical simulation work showing how twisted disks align when their mechanics are described only in terms of real forces, including MHD turbulence. The detailed mechanisms of alignment are identified, the rate at which it occurs is quantified, and the isotropic viscosity model is shown to be in drastic disagreement with the simulation data.