The formation and evolution of massive black hole seeds in the early Universe

Understand

Tracking the evolution of high redshift seed black hole masses to late times, we examine the observable signatures today.

• These massive initial black hole seeds form at extremely high redshifts from the direct collapse of pre-galactic gas discs.
• Populating dark matter halos with seeds formed in this fashion, we follow the mass assembly history of these black holes to the present time using a Monte-Carlo merger tree approach.
• Utilizing this formalism, we predict the black hole mass function at high redshifts and at the present time; the integrated mass density of black holes in the Universe; the luminosity function of accreting black holes as a function of redshift and the scatter in observed, local M-sigma relation.