Constraints from dwarf galaxies on black hole seeding and growth models with current and future surveys

Understand

Dwarf galaxies are promising test beds for constraining models of supermassive and intermediate-mass black holes (MBH) via their black hole occupation fraction (BHOF).

• Disentangling seeding from the confounding effects of mass assembly over a Hubble time is a challenging problem, that we tackle in this study with a suite of semi-analytical models (SAMs).
• We show how measured BHOF depends on the lowest black hole mass or AGN luminosity achieved by a survey.
• To tell seeding models apart, we need to detect or model all AGN brighter than $10^{37}\ \rm{erg \ s^{-1}}$ in galaxies of $M_* \sim 10^{8-10} \ \rm{M_{\odot}}$.