Accretion-Driven Evolution of Black Holes: Eddington Ratios, Duty Cycles, and Active Galaxy Fractions

TL;DR

This paper develops semi-empirical models of supermassive black hole growth and AGN activity, incorporating observational constraints on Eddington ratios and active galaxy fractions to understand their evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized continuity-equation framework with flexible Eddington ratio distributions, linking black hole growth, AGN fractions, and luminosity functions across cosmic time.

Findings

High AGN fractions at low redshift require declining Eddington ratios.

Eddington ratio distributions broaden at low redshift.

Matching local black hole mass functions suggests increased radiative efficiency for massive black holes.

Abstract

We develop semi-empirical models of the supermassive black hole and active galactic nucleus (AGN) populations, which incorporate the black hole growth implied by the observed AGN luminosity function assuming a radiative efficiency \epsilon, and a distribution of Eddington ratios \lambda. By generalizing these continuity-equation models to allow a distribution P(\lambda|mbh,z) we are able to draw on constraints from observationally estimated P(\lambda) distributions and active galaxy fractions while accounting for the luminosity thresholds of observational samples. We consider models with a Gaussian distribution of log \lambda, and Gaussians augmented with a power-law tail to low \lambda. Within our framework, reproducing the high observed AGN fractions at low redshift requires a characteristic Eddington ratio \lambda_c that declines at late times, and matching observed Eddington ratio distributions requires P(\lambda) that broadens at low redshift. To reproduce the observed increase of AGN fraction with black hole or galaxy mass, we also require a \lambda_c that decreases with increasing black hole mass, reducing the AGN luminosity associated with the most massive black holes. Finally, achieving a good match to the high mass end of the local black hole mass function requires an increased radiative efficiency at high black hole mass. We discuss the potential impact of black hole mergers or a \lambda-dependent bolometric correction, and we compute evolutionary predictions for black hole and galaxy specific accretion rates. Despite the flexibility of our framework, no one model provides a good fit to all the data we consider.