| Abstract: | Circumbinary accretion disks exist in Nature over a wide range of masses, separation and energy regimes. These disks are expected to play a role in the evolution of supermassive binary black holes at the centers of galaxies and to form around protostellar binaries. The disks are also key elements to planet formation, as the detection of circumbinary planets indicates that circumbinary disks are able to form planets (nearly) as efficiently as their circum-single counterparts. Disks around young stellar binaries are observed in star-forming regions and their hosts often exhibit peculiar variability in diverse accretion signatures. This variability has been dubbed “pulsed accretion”. I will discuss the results of new long-term numerical simulation of pulsed accretion using different numerical methods. I will show how new numerical schemes provide a powerful tool to simulate the complex nature of circumbinary accretion, and will discuss how pulsed accretion differs between low-eccentricity and high-eccentricity binaries. These results have important implications for the accretion behavior of binary T-Tauri stars and supermassive binary black holes. |
