The Race Between Stars and Quasars in Reionizing Cosmic Hydrogen

The cosmological background of ionizing radiation has been dominated by quasars once the Universe aged by ~2 billion years. At earlier times (redshifts z>3), the observed abundance of bright quasars declined sharply, implying that cosmic hydrogen was reionized by stars instead. Here, we explain the physical origin of the transition between the dominance of stars and quasars as a generic feature of structure formation in the concordance LCDM cosmology. At early times, the fraction of baryons in galaxies grows faster than the maximum (Eddington-limited) growth rate possible for quasars. As a result, quasars were not able to catch up with the rapid early growth of stellar mass in their host galaxies.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Accepted for publication in JCA

Primordial Structure of Massive Black Hole Clusters

We describe a mechanism of the primordial black holes formation that can explain the existence of a population of supermassive black holes in galactic bulges. The mechanism is based on the formation of black holes from closed domain walls. The origin of such domain walls could be a result of the evolution of an effectively massless scalar field during inflation. The initial non-equilibrium distribution of the scalar field imposed by background de-Sitter fluctuations gives rise to the spectrum of black holes, which covers a wide range of masses -- from superheavy ones down to deeply subsolar. The primordial black holes of smaller masses are concentrated around the most massive ones within a fractal-like cluster.Comment: 19 pages; 3 figures; The final version accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

'Disc-jet' coupling in black hole X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei

In this chapter I will review the status of our phenomenological understanding of the relation between accretion and outflows in accreting black hole systems. This understanding arises primarily from observing the relation between X-ray and longer wavelength (infrared, radio) emission. The view is necessarily a biased one, beginning with observations of X-ray binary systems, and attempting to see if they match with the general observational properties of active galactic nuclei.Comment: 28 pages, 15 figures, To appear in Belloni, T. (ed.): The Jet Paradigm - From Microquasars to Quasars, Lect. Notes Phys. 794 (2009