The Structure of Cooling Fronts in Accretion Disks

Recent work has shown that the speed of the cooling front in soft X-ray transients may be an important clue in understanding the nature of accretion disk viscosity. In a previous paper (Vishniac & Wheeler), we derived the scaling law for the cooling front speed. Here we derive a similarity solution for the hot inner part of disks undergoing cooling. This solution is exact in the limit of a thin disk, power-law opacities, and a minimum hot state …