H2 suppression with shocking inflows: testing a pathway for supermassive black hole formation

Abstract

The presence of quasars at redshifts z > 6 indicates the existence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) as massive as a few times 10^9 Msun, challenging models for SMBH formation. One pathway is through the direct collapse of gas in T_{vir} > 10^4 K halos; however, this requires the suppression of H_2 cooling to prevent fragmentation. In this paper, we examine a proposed new mechanism for this suppression which relies on cold-mode accretion flows leading to shocks at high densities (n > 10^4 cm^{-3}) and temperatures (T > 10^4 K). In such gas, H_2 is efficiently collisionally dissociated. We use high-resolution numerical simulations to test this idea, demonstrating that such halos typically have lower temperature progenitors, in which cooling is efficient. Those halos do show filamentary flows; however, the gas shocks at or near the virial radius (at low densities), thus preventing the proposed collisional mechanism from operating. We do find that, if we artificially suppress H_2 formation with a high UV background, so as to allow gas in the halo center to enter the high-temperature, high-density "zone of no return", it will remain there even if the UV flux is turned off, collapsing to high density at high temperature. Due to computational limitations, we simulated only three halos. However, we demonstrate, using Monte Carlo calculations of 10^6 halo merger histories, that a few rare halos could assemble rapidly enough to avoid efficient H_2 cooling in all of their progenitor halos, provided that the UV background exceeds J_{21} ~ few at redshifts as high as z ~ 20.