Seeds Don't Sink: Even Massive Black Hole "Seeds" Cannot Migrate to Galaxy Centers Efficiently

Understand

Possible formation scenarios of supermassive black holes in the early universe include rapid growth from less massive seed black holes (BHs) via super-Eddington accretion or runaway mergers, yet both of these scenarios would require seed BHs to efficiently sink to and be trapped in the galactic center via dynamical friction.

• This may not be true for their complicated dynamics in clumpy high-$z$ galaxies.
• In this work we study this "sinking problem" with state-of-the-art high-resolution cosmological simulations, combined with both direct $N$-body integration of seed BH trajectories and post-processing of randomly generated test particles with a newly developed dynamical friction estimator.
• We find that seed BHs less massive than $10^8\,M_\odot$ (i.e., all but the already-supermassive seeds) cannot efficiently sink in typical high-$z$ galaxies.