Massive black holes at high redshifts from superconducting cosmic strings

TL;DR

This paper explores how superconducting cosmic string loops could create the early universe conditions necessary to form massive black hole seeds, potentially explaining high-redshift quasars.

Contribution

It demonstrates that superconducting cosmic string loops can generate sufficient overdensities to produce massive black hole seeds at high redshifts, a novel mechanism in cosmology.

Findings

Superconducting cosmic string loops can induce primordial gas cloud collapse.

Massive black hole seeds of about 10^5 solar masses can form at redshift ~300.

The parameter space of string tension and current supports this formation mechanism.

Abstract

The observation of quasars at high redshifts presents a mystery in the theory of black hole formation. In order to source such objects, one often relies on the presence of heavy seeds ($M \approx 10^{4-6} \, M_{\odot}$) in place at early times. Unfortunately, the formation of these heavy seeds are difficult to realize within the standard astrophysical context. Here, we investigate whether superconducting cosmic string loops can source sufficiently strong overdensities in the early universe to address this mystery. We review a set of direct collapse conditions under which a primordial gas cloud will undergo monolithic collapse into a massive black hole (forming with a mass of $M_{BH} \approx 10^5 \, M_{\odot}$ at $z \approx 300$ in our scenario), and systematically show how superconducting cosmic string loops can satisfy such conditions in regions of the $G\mu-I$ parameter space.