Formation of Super-Massive Black Holes

Super-massive black holes with masses exceeding one Billion solar masses are observed at the centres of a large variety of galaxies in the local Universe and even as early as 1 Billion years after the Big Bang. While progress has been achieved in understanding the co-evolution of black holes and their hosting galaxies, we still do not know the physical origin of their black hole seeds.

We will investigate alternative and newly proposed black hole formation mechanisms, including the direct collapse of self-interacting DM halos and primordial black hole formation mechanisms tied to inflation, analytically and using numerical relativity. We aim to study gravitational wave signals, seed masses and abundance statistics that might be used to inform cosmological simulations aiming to predict black hole demographics as well as probe observational signals relevant to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and upcoming GW surveys, as they provide testable predictions, interpretation, and direction for future observational campaigns.