Light Curves of Time-dependent Accretion Disks in Tidal Disruption Events

Abstract Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are believed to be an ideal laboratory for studying the evolution of accretion flow around a supermassive black hole (BH). In general, the mass feeding rate to the BH is suggested to be super-Eddington initially and evolves to be sub-Eddington on timescales of years. In this paper, we carry out calculations of the time-dependent evolution of accretion disks in the standard environment of TDEs, i.e., injecting matter at the circularization radius of the stellar debris in the form of M ̇ inject ∝ t − 5 / 3 . We find that when M ̇ inject evolves to a value around the Eddington accretion rate, the radiation pressure instability occurs. We test the influence of the model parameters on the light curves, such as the BH mass M BH , viscosity parameter α , and mass-injecting radius R out , all of which are found to affect the light curves to some extent. In most cases, we find that the light curves oscillate significantly owing to the radiation pressure instability. As an exception, when α is small or R out is large, we find that the oscillations are completely suppressed. In this case, the light curve drops steeply and then becomes flat in the late-time evolution, which we apply to explain the observed ultraviolet light curves of ASASSN-15oi and ASASSN-14ae, together with the assumption of a photosphere. Finally, we discuss the potential applications of our time-dependent accretion disk model to explaining multiband light curves of TDEs in the future.