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The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade Participants
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Talk
Title: Mechanisms of SMBH Seed Formation Author(s): Daniel Whalen Abstract: One of the conundrums of cosmological structure formation is the presence of supermassive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of massive galaxies at z ~ 6, just a Gyr after the Big Bang. Simple analytical arguments indicate that seed black holes of a hundred solar masses at z ~ 20 can grow to 10^9 solar masses if they continuously accrete at nearly the Eddington limit over this epoch, an optimistic assumption given that radiative and kinetic feedback processes in all likelihood would reduce infall efficiencies well below this value. This realization has motivated the search for mechanisms that create more massive black holes at early times that, with more realistic accretion rates, are capable of growing into the SMBH found in the SDSS quasars. I will review the analytical and numerical work done on SMBH seed formation to date and discuss additional processes that may have created massive black holes at high redshifts.
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