Missing Absorption Features in the Soft State Spectra of Black Hole X-ray Binaries

In this work, we investigate a long-standing discrepancy between theory and observations of accretion disks in black hole X-ray binaries, where numerical models predict relativistically broadened atomic absorption features in the photon spectra that are absent from data. We self-consistently solved the disk vertical structure and radiative transfer equations using a range of dissipation profiles based on results from recent three-dimensional simulations. We found that the strength of these features decreases as the fraction of gravitational potential energy lost that goes into heating the region near the photosphere increases and that the absorption is optically thin.