Nucleosynthesis Contribution of Neutrino-dominated Accretion Flows to the Chemical Evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper investigates how neutrino-dominated accretion flows (NDAFs) with outflows contribute to the rapid early metal enrichment in high-redshift quasars, explaining their observed super-solar metallicities.

Contribution

It introduces NDAFs with outflows into chemical evolution models, showing their significant role in early metal enrichment of quasars beyond supernova contributions.

Findings

NDAFs with outflows increase early Universe metal enrichment.

Quasar metallicity can reach ~20 times solar at z~8.

NDAF contribution accounts for ~20% of metals at high redshift.

Abstract

Recent observations of quasars show high line-flux ratios in their broad emission lines and the ratios appear to be independent of redshift up to $z \gtrsim 6$, which indicate that the broad-line regions of these early quasars are surprisingly metal-rich. Here, we revisit the chemical evolution of high-redshift quasars by adding a new ingredient, i.e., the neutrino-dominated accretion flows (NDAFs) with outflows, on top of the conventional core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe). In the presence of the chemical contribution from NDAFs with outflows, the total metal mass (i.e., the summation of the conventional CCSN and NDAFs with outflows) per CCSN depends weakly upon the mass of the progenitor star if the mass is in the range of $\sim 25-55~M_{\odot}$. We model the chemical evolution by adopting a improved open-box model with three typical initial mass functions (IMFs). We find that, with the additional chemical contribution from NDAFs with outflows, the quasar metallicity can be enriched more rapidly in the very early Universe ($z \sim 10$) and reaches higher saturation than the no-NDAF case at $z \sim 8$, after which they evolve slowly with redshift. The quasar metallicity can reach $\sim 20~Z_{\odot}$ ($Z_\odot$ denotes the metallicity of the Sun; and $\sim 20\%$ of which is produced by NDAF outflows) at $z \sim 8$ for the ``top-heavy'' IMF model in \citet{Toyouchi2022}, which readily explains the quasar observations on the super-solar metal abundance and redshift-independent evolution.