Polarization Architecture of Steady GRMHD Jets from the Horizon to Infinity
Zhenyu Zhang, Yehui Hou, Yu Song, Yosuke Mizuno, Bin Chen
astro-ph.HE, gr-qc
Submitted: 2026-07-02
Comments: 22 pages, 8 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We develop a semi-analytic framework for stationary, axisymmetric GRMHD jets that efficiently generates resolved polarized images from the near-horizon region out to about 10 5,r g across a broad
Terminology
Abstract
We develop a semi-analytic framework for stationary, axisymmetric GRMHD jets that efficiently generates resolved polarized images from the near-horizon region out to about 10 5,r g across a broad parameter space, enabling rapid exploration of how gravity and magnetohydrodynamic flows imprint scale-dependent signatures on jet morphology and polarization. We identify a new scale-dependent separation in polarimetric diagnostics. Outside the photon ring, plasma loading strongly modifies the polarization-angle profile of the integrated jet-layer emission through inertia-driven winding of the magnetic field. At large image-plane radii, the polarization angle follows a power-law in radius, with an index determined by the jet collimation profile. Near the horizon, in contrast, jets converge to a universal polarization pattern controlled solely by black hole spin. This convergence is hierarchical: differences in velocity and magnetic-field structure are erased first, whereas collimation-dependent differences persist to smaller radii, thereby allowing these effects to be disentangled. These results establish a largely achromatic polarimetric diagnostic that connects GRMHD jet dynamics to resolved image structure, with direct implications for high-resolution polarimetry and for constraining black hole spin and jet formation.
Sources
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