Robustness to thermodynamic treatment

Determine whether the circumstellar-disk response and accretion-pulse behavior in highly misaligned circumbinary disks around eccentric equal-mass binaries remain robust under alternative, more self-consistent thermodynamic treatments, including shock heating and radiative cooling.

Background

The simulations use a modified locally isothermal equation of state designed to increase circumstellar-disk mass and numerical resolution. This prescription does not self-consistently model shock heating, radiative cooling, or thermal evolution.

Because thermodynamic prescriptions can alter circumbinary-cavity structure, disk precession, circumstellar-disk eccentricity, thickness, and shock structure, it remains unresolved whether the reported circumstellar-disk response and accretion-pulse properties are physical consequences of the binary–disk configuration or depend substantially on the adopted thermodynamics.

References

The robustness of both the CSD response and the accretion pulse to the thermodynamic treatment therefore remains to be tested.

— Pulsed Accretion onto Eccentric Binaries in Highly Misaligned Circumbinary Disks  (2609.30782 - Yang et al., 25 Sep 2026) in Section 4.3, “Limitations and future work”