Radiation Driven Warping of Circumbinary Disks around Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Active Galactic Nuclei

We study a wraping instability of a geometrically thin, non-self-gravitating disk surrounding binary supermassive black holes on a circular orbit. Such a circumbinay disk is subject to not only tidal torques due Line 8 to the binary gravitational potential but also radiative rorques due to radiation emitted from each accretion disk. We find tat a circumbinary disk initially aligned with the binary orbital plane is unstable to radiation-driven warping beyond the marginally stable warping radius, which is sensitive to both the ratio of vertical to horizontal shear viscosities and the mass-to-energy conversion efficiency. As expected, the tidal torques give no contribution to the growth of warping modes but tend to align the circumbinary disk with the orbital plane. Since the tidal torques can suppress the warping modes in the inner part of circumbinary disk, the circumbinaary disk starts to be warped at the radii larger than the marginally stable warping radius. If the warping radius is of the order of 0.1 pc, a resultant semi-major axis is estimated to be of the order of 10-2 pc to 10-4 pc for 107 Msun black hole. We also discuss the posibility that the central objects of observed warped maser disks in active galactic nuclei are binary supermassive black holes with a triple disk: two accretion disks around the individual black holes and one circumbinary disk surrounding them.