Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

X-ray binaries are known to exhibit different spectral states which are associated with different black hole accretion modes. In particular the geometry of the hot accretion flow in hard spectral state is still not fully understood. Recent measurements of linear polarization of X-ray emission in X-ray binary Cygnus X-1 allow us to test models for the hard state of accretion in a unique way. In this talk I will discuss which general relativistic radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accreting stellar black hole are consistent with the new observational information and compare the numerical results with the results from semi-analytic modeling approaches.