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Published on: November 15, 2013
Direct Collapse Supermassive Black Holes from Relic Particle Decay
Yifan Lu1, Zachary S C Picker1, Alexander Kusenko1,2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, <a href="https://ror.org/046rm7j60">University of California Los Angeles</a>, Los Angeles, California 90095-1547, USA.
Abstract:
We investigate the formation of high-redshift supermassive black holes (SMBHs) via the direct collapse of baryonic clouds, where the unwanted formation of molecular hydrogen is successfully suppressed by a Lyman-Werner (LW) photon background from relic particle decay. We improve on existing studies by dynamically simulating the collapse, accounting for the adiabatic contraction of the DM halo, as well as the in situ production of the LW photons within the cloud which reduce the impact of the cloud's shielding. We find a viable parameter space where the decay of either some of the dark matter or all of a subdominant decaying species successfully allows direct collapse of the cloud to a SMBH.
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