Normal Modes of Black Hole Accretion Disks

This paper studies the hydrodynamical problem of normal modes of small adiabatic oscillations of relativistic barotropic thin accretion disks around black holes (and compact weakly magnetic neutron stars). Employing WKB techniques, we obtain the eigen frequencies and eigenfunctions of the modes for different values of the mass and angular momentum of the central black hole. We discuss the properties of the various types of modes and examine the role of viscosity, as it appears to render some of the modes unstable to rapid growth