Statistical predictions for the first black holes

Abstract

The recent observations of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at high redshift challenge our understanding of their formation and growth. There are different proposed pathways to form black hole (BH) seeds, such as the remnants of the first stars (chapter 4), gas-dynamical processes (chapter 5), direct collapse (chapter 6), or stellar collisions in dense nuclear clusters (chapter 7). In this chapter, we discuss the probability of forming supermassive black holes (SMBHs) via these channels and determine the expected number density of the BH seeds. We start with a brief discussion of the observational constraints on SMBHs at low and high redshift that theoretical models have to reproduce (a more detailed account is provided in chapter 12). We further present the most popular formation channels of SMBHs, discuss under which conditions they can reproduce the observations, and compare various estimates in the literature on the expected number density of SMBHs. To account for the density of quasars at $z>6$ requires very efficient gas accretion mechanisms or high BH seeds masses. The bottleneck to obtain sufficiently high number densities of seed BHs with masses $>10^5$M$_\odot$ is the interplay between radiative and chemical feedback, which constrains the conditions for primordial, isothermal gas collapse.