Super-critical accretion of medium-weight seed black holes in gaseous proto-galactic nuclei

Understand

Accretion at sustained or episodic super-Eddington (SE) rates has been proposed as a pathway to grow efficiently light seeds produced by Pop-III stars.

• We investigate if SE accretion can be sustained onto a black hole (BH) with $M_{\odot} \sim 10^3$~M$_{\odot}$ in the centre of a gas-rich proto-galaxy at $z=15$.
• We perform high-resolution smoothed-particle hydrodynamical simulations, including two different sub-grid models for SE accretion, one based on the slim disc paradigm, and one inspired by recent radiation-magnetohydrodynamical simulations by Jiang and collaborators.
• Radiative feedback has the form of a thermal dump to surrounding gas particles, with the radiative efficiency being set according to the different SE accretion models.