Debora Sijacki - December 7, 2015

Simulating the formation and growth of supermassive black holes at 1 pc
resolution

In this talk I will present cosmological simulations of supermassive 
black hole formation and growth at extremely high resolution. 
I will first show how the runaway stellar collisions in high redshift, 
metal poor star clusters result in very massive stars of up to ~1000 MSun. 
These can then directly collapse into intermediate mass black holes 
producing large numbers of high redshift seeds required for the formation 
of supermassive black holes by z = 6.

I will then present a novel method that permits to resolve gas flows 
around black holes all the way from large cosmological scales to the 
Bondi radii of black holes themselves. I will demonstrate that with 
this new numerical technique it is possible to estimate much more 
accurately gas properties in the vicinity of black holes than has been 
feasible before in galaxy and cosmological simulations, and I will 
outline which consequences this has for the growth of z = 6 quasars 
and for the morphologies of their host galaxies.

Finally, I will also discuss if AGN-driven outflows are more likely to 
be energy- or momentum-driven and how this ties in with the recent 
observational evidence of large-scale molecular outflows launched by 
powerful high redshift quasars.