Constraints on the mass accretion rate onto the supermassive black hole of cygnus a using the submillimeter array

We present the first detailed polarimetric studies of Cygnus A at 230 GHz with the Submillimeter Array (SMA) to constrain the mass accretion rate onto its supermassive black hole. We detected the polarized emission associated with the core at a fractional polarization of 0.73 ± 0.15%. This low fractional polarization suggests that the polarized emission is highly depolarized. One of the possible explanations is due to a significant variance in the Faraday rotation measure within the synthesized beam. By assuming the Faraday depolarization caused by inhomogeneous column density of the magnetized plasma associated with the surrounding radiatively-inefficient accretion flow within the SMA beam, we derived the constraint on the mass accretion rate to be larger than 0.15 M yr-1 at the Bondi radius. The derived constraint indicates that an adiabatic inflow-outflow solution or an advection-dominated accretion flow should be preferable as the accretion flow model in order to explain the jet power of Cygnus A.