Abstract

Supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) with sub-pc separations form in the course of galaxy mergers, if both galaxies harbor massive black holes. Clear observational evidence for them however still eludes us. We propose a novel method of identifying these systems by means of reverberation mapping their circumbinary disk after a tidal disruption event has ionized it. The tidal disruption of a star at the secondary leads to strong asymmetries in the disk response. We model the shape of the velocity-delay maps for various toy disk models and more realistic gas distributions obtained by smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. The emissivity of the ionized disk is calculated with Cloudy. We find peculiar asymmetries in the maps for off center ionizing sources that may help us constrain geometrical parameters of a circumbinary disk such as semimajor axis and orbital phase of the secondary, as well as help strengthen the observational evidence for sub-parsec SMBBHs as such.