A Heavy Seed Black Hole Mass Function at High Redshift -- Prospects for LISA

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation and growth of heavy seed black holes at high redshift using cosmological simulations, predicting their merger signals detectable by LISA despite limited growth.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of heavy seed black hole growth and merger rates at high redshift, with implications for gravitational wave observations by LISA.

Findings

Heavy seed black holes struggle to grow significantly by high redshift.

LISA can detect approximately 10 MBH mergers per year at z ≥ 10.

Merger signals from these black holes will be strong enough for detection.

Abstract

The advent of new and near-future observatories probing the earliest epochs of the Universe has opened the opportunity to investigate the formation and growth of the first massive black holes (MBHs). Additionally, the use of high resolution cosmological simulations to investigate these high-redshift environments is needed to predict the dark matter halos in which these MBH seeds will form. We use the Renaissance simulations to analyse the formation and growth of so-called heavy seed black holes. Other past work has investigated the formation and growth of light (black hole) seeds with Renaissance and found that these black holes do not grow in the environments in which they reside. In this work we seed MBHs, in post-processing, and track accretion onto the MBHs as well as mergers with other MBHs at high-redshift. We show that the heavy seeds struggle to achieve high accretion rates with only the most massive black holes ($\gtrsim 10^5 M_{\odot}$) growing at close to the Eddington limit under optimistic conditions. Despite the lack of significant growth for these early MBHs, the signals from their merger events will be sufficiently strong (SNR $\sim 10^2$) to be probed by the next generation of gravitational wave observatories, such as LISA. We predict that LISA will observe of the order of 10 MBH merger events per year where the mergers occur at z $\gtrsim$ 10 or at least begin their early inspiral phase at z $\gtrsim$ 10.