Representing low mass black hole seeds in cosmological simulations: A new sub-grid stochastic seed model

Abstract The physical origin of the seeds of supermassive black holes (SMBHs), with postulated initial masses ranging from ∼105 M⊙ to as low as ∼102 M⊙, is currently unknown. Most existing cosmological hydrodynamic simulations adopt very simple, ad hoc prescriptions for BH seeding and seed at unphysically high masses ∼105 − 106 M⊙. In this work, we introduce a novel sub-grid BH seeding model for cosmological simulations that is directly calibrated to high resolution zoom simulations that explicitly resolve ∼103 M⊙ seeds forming within halos with pristine, dense gas. We trace the BH growth along galaxy merger trees until their descendants reach masses of ∼104 or 105 M⊙. The results are used to build a new stochastic seeding model that directly seeds these descendants in lower resolution versions of our zoom region. Remarkably, we find that by seeding the descendants simply based on total galaxy mass, redshift and an environmental richness parameter, we can reproduce the results of the detailed gas-based seeding model. The baryonic properties of the host galaxies are well reproduced by the mass-based seeding criterion. The redshift-dependence of the mass-based criterion captures the combined influence of halo growth, dense gas formation and metal enrichment on the formation of ∼103 M⊙ seeds. The environment-based seeding criterion seeds the descendants in rich environments with higher numbers of neighboring galaxies. This accounts for the impact of unresolved merger dominated growth of BHs, which produces faster growth of descendants in richer environments with more extensive BH merger history. Our new seed model will be useful for representing a variety of low mass seeding channels within next generation larger volume uniform cosmological simulations.