Cosmological Simulations of Early Blackhole Formation: Halo Mergers, Tidal Disruption, and the Conditions for Direct Collapse

Understand

Gravitational collapse of a massive primordial gas cloud is thought to be a promising path for the formation of supermassive blackholes in the early universe.

• We study conditions for the so-called direct collapse (DC) blackhole formation in a fully cosmological context.
• We combine a semianalytic model of early galaxy formation with halo merger trees constructed from dark matter $N$-body simulations.
• We locate a total of 68 possible DC sites in a volume of $20\;h^{-1}\;\mathrm{Mpc}$ on a side.