Assembly of supermassive black hole seeds

Abstract

We present a suite of six fully cosmological, three-dimensional simulations of the collapse of an atomic cooling halo in the early Universe. We use the moving-mesh code AREPO with an improved primordial chemistry network to evolve the hydrodynamical and chemical equations. The addition of a strong Lyman–Werner background suppresses molecular hydrogen cooling and permits the gas to evolve nearly isothermally at a temperature of about 8000 K. Strong gravitational torques effectively remove angular momentum and lead to the central collapse of gas, forming a supermassive protostar at the centre of the halo. We model the protostar using two methods: sink particles that grow through mergers with other sink particles, and a stiff equation of state that leads to the formation of an adiabatic core. We impose threshold densities of 108, 1010, and 1012 cm-3 for the sink particle formation and the onset of the stiff equation of state to study the late, intermediate, and early stages in the evolution of the protostar, respectively. We follow its growth from masses ≃10 to ≃105 M☉, with an average accretion rate of 〈M.★〉 ≃ 2 M☉ yr-1 for sink particles, and ≃0.8–1.4 M☉ yr-1 for the adiabatic cores. At the end of the simulations, the H II region generated by radiation from the central object has long detached from the protostellar photosphere, but the ionizing radiation remains trapped in the inner host halo, and has thus not yet escaped into the intergalactic medium. Fully coupled, radiation–hydrodynamics simulations hold the key for further progress.