Light, medium-weight or heavy? The nature of the first supermassive black hole seeds
F. Sassano, R. Schneider, R. Valiante, K. Inayoshi, S. Chon, K., Omukai, L. Mayer, P. R. Capelo

TL;DR
This study investigates the origins of supermassive black holes at high redshift, analyzing the roles of light, medium-weight, and heavy seeds, and finds that heavy seeds primarily drive SMBH growth through efficient gas accretion.
Contribution
First to analyze the relative importance of different seed populations in SMBH formation at z>6 using a semi-analytical model with spatial fluctuations and enrichment effects.
Findings
Heavy seeds dominate SMBH growth via gas accretion.
Medium-weight seeds have limited impact on SMBH evolution.
SMBH progenitors are a small fraction of early black hole population.
Abstract
Observations of hyper-luminous quasars at reveal the rapid growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs ) whose origin is still difficult to explain. Their progenitors may have formed as remnants of massive, metal free stars (light seeds), via stellar collisions (medium-weight seeds) and/or massive gas clouds direct collapse (heavy seeds). In this work we investigate for the first time the relative role of these three seed populations in the formation of SMBHs within an Eddington-limited gas accretion scenario. To this aim, we implement in our semi-analytical data-constrained model a statistical description of the spatial fluctuations of Lyman-Werner (LW) photo-dissociating radiation and of metal/dust enrichment. This allows us to set the physical conditions for BH seeds formation, exploring their relative birth rate in a highly biased region of the…
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