Andrea Kulier, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Priyamvada Natarajan, Claire N. Lackner, Renyue Cen
Accretion and merger triggered accretion episodes are thought to primarily contribute to the mass accumulation history of supermassive black holes throughout cosmic time. While this might be the dominant growth mode at high redshifts, at lower redshifts and for the most massive black holes, mergers themselves might add significantly to the mass budget. In this paper, we use merger trees derived from hydrodynamical cosmological simulations of a cluster and void region to examine the growth of SMBHs from 4 > z > 0. Mass gains from gas accretion and BH-BH mergers are tracked as are black holes that remain unmerged and "orbiting" due to insufficient dynamical friction in a merger remnant, as well as those that are ejected due to gravitational recoil. We find that gas accretion remains the dominant source of mass accumulation in almost all of the SMBHs produced; mergers contribute an average of 3.3 +/- 0.2% for all SMBHs in the cluster, and 1.3 +/- 0.2% in the void from z = 4 to 0. However, mergers are significant for massive SMBHs, with the contribution from mergers reaching a maximum of 20% in the cluster for black holes with mass around 10^9 M_sun. We also find that the total mass in orbiting SMBHs is generally negligible in the void, but significant in the cluster, with a median value of M_orbiting >~ 10^7 M_sun per galaxy for galaxies with stellar mass M_{*} > 10^11.5 M_sun. We find that 40% of SMBHs and approximately 14% of the total SMBH mass is found orbiting in the cluster region at z = 0. We estimate the correction to the Soltan argument due to such orbiting SMBHs as well as SMBHs ejected via gravitational slingshot effects to be in the range 1.6 - 15%, with a mean value of 7.4 +/- 3.7% in the estimate of the inventory of the integrated accreted mass density of SMBHs. We also calculate the total energy output and strain due to gravitational waves emitted by merging SMBHs.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.3684
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