Speaker: Yueying Ni (Carnegie Mellon)
Supermassive Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations
The upcoming high-redshift observations will soon revolutionize the study of the early universe and allow us to better understand the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. Making full use of the future observations will require a new generation of cosmological simulations with statistical samples of large structures and with high resolution to model the associated galaxy formation process. In the first part of the talk, I will introduce the ASTRID simulation, one of the largest cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with 2x5500^3 particles in 250 Mpc/h cosmic volume evolved down to z=3. ASTRID concurrently models the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes through cosmic time and traces the black hole dynamics and mergers with higher fidelity.
Due to the volume limitation, current state-of-art galaxy formation simulations can hardly sample and study the extremely rare z>6 quasar populations. In the second part of my talk, I will introduce how the Constrained Realization (CR) technique can be used in cosmological simulations to efficiently sample and study the rare massive objects conditioned on certain (user-specified) large-scale features. We investigate the impact of the large-scale structure on the early quasar growth and show that the initial density peak with high compactness embedded in a low tidal field will induce the most rapid black hole growth in the early universe.
