Black Hole Merger Rates in AGN: contribution from gas-captured binaries

TL;DR

This study models black hole mergers in active galactic nuclei, showing that gas-captured binaries could significantly contribute to gravitational wave events, especially involving high-mass black holes, with rates up to 7.1 Gpc$^{-3}$yr$^{-1}$.

Contribution

It introduces a novel physically motivated simulation approach for gas-capture in AGN, providing new estimates of merger rates and mass distributions, highlighting the importance of AGN as a gravitational wave source.

Findings

Gas-captured binaries could produce merger rates of 0.73 - 7.1 Gpc$^{-3}$yr$^{-1}$.

Most mergers occur near the outer boundary of the accretion disk.

The mass distribution of merging black holes is flatter than the initial distribution.

Abstract

It has been suggested that merging black hole (BH) binaries in active galactic nucleus (AGN) discs formed through two-body scatterings via the gas-capture process may explain a significant fraction of BH mergers in AGN and a non-negligible contribution to the observed rate from LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA. We perform Monte Carlo simulations of BH and binary BH formation, evolution and mergers across the observed AGN mass function using a novel physically motivated treatment for the gas-capture process derived from hydrodynamical simulations of BH-BH encounters in AGN and varying assumptions on the AGN disc physics. The results suggest that gas-captured binaries could result in merger rates of 0.73 - 7.1Gpc$^{-3}$yr$^{-1}$. Most mergers take place near the outer boundary of the accretion disk, but this may be subject to change when migration is considered. The BH merger rate in the AGN channel in the Universe is dominated by AGN with supermassive BH masses on the order of 10$^{7} M_\odot$ , with 90% of mergers occurring in the range 10$^{6} M_\odot$ - 10$^{8} M_\odot$ . The merging mass distribution is flatter than the initial BH mass power law by a factor $\Delta \xi$ = 1.1 to 1.2, as larger BHs can align with the disc and successfully form binaries more efficiently. Similarly, the merging mass ratio distribution is flatter, therefore the AGN channel could easily explain the high mass and unequal mass ratio detections such as GW190521 and GW190814. When modelling the BH binary formation process using a simpler dynamical friction treatment, we observe very similar results, where the primary bottleneck is the alignment time with the disk. We find the most influential parameters on the rates are the anticipated number of BHs and their mass function. We conclude that AGN remain an important channel for consideration, particularly for gravitational wave detections involving one or two high mass BHs.