Magnetic fields during the formation of supermassive black holes

Abstract

Observations of quasars at $\rm z> 6$ report the existence of a billion solar mass black holes. Comprehending their formation in such a short time scale is a matter of ongoing research. One of the most promising scenarios to assemble supermassive black holes is a monolithic collapse of protogalactic gas clouds in atomic cooling halos with $\rm T_{vir} \geq 10^{4} K$. In this article, we study the amplification and impact of magnetic fields during the formation of seed black holes in massive primordial halos. We perform high resolution cosmological magnetohydrodynamics simulations for four distinct halos and follow their collapse for a few free-fall times until the simulations reach a peak density of $\rm 7 \times 10^{-10} g/cm^{3}$. Our findings show that irrespective of the initial seed field, the magnetic field strength reaches a saturated state in the presence of strong accretion shocks. Under such conditions, the growth time becomes very short and amplification occurs rapidly within a small fraction of the free-fall time. We find that the presence of such strong magnetic fields provides additional support against gravity and helps in suppressing fragmentation. Massive clumps of a few hundred solar masses are formed at the end of our simulations and high accretion rates of $\rm 1 M_{\odot}/yr$ are observed. We expect that in the presence of such accretion rates, the clumps will grow to form supermassive stars of $\rm \sim 10^{5} M_{\odot}$. Overall, the role of the magnetic fields seems supportive for the formation of massive black holes.