Intermediate mass black holes in AGN disks: I. Production & Growth

Understand

Here we propose a mechanism for efficiently growing intermediate mass black holes (IMBH) in disks around supermassive black holes.

• Stellar mass objects can efficiently agglomerate when facilitated by the gas disk.
• Stars, compact objects and binaries can migrate, accrete and merge within disks around supermassive black holes.
• While dynamical heating by cusp stars excites the velocity dispersion of nuclear cluster objects (NCOs) in the disk, gas in the disk damps NCO orbits.