The Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect as a Probe of Black Hole Feedback

Feedback from supermassive black holes has a substantial but only partially understood impact on structure formation in the universe. The Sunyaev-Zeldovich signal from the hot gas that is present in black hole environments serves, as a potential probe of this feedback mechanism. Using a simple one-dimensional Sedov-Taylor model of energy outflow we calculate the angular power spectrum of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortion. The amplitude of temperature fluctuation is of the order of a micro-Kelvin in the cosmic microwave background at arcminute scales. This signal is at or below the noise level of current microwave experiments including the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope. To further investigate this effect we have constructed microwave maps of the resulting distortion around individual black holes from a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation. The simulation employs a self-consistent treatment of star formation, supernova feedback and accretion and feedback from supermassive black holes. We show that the temperature distortion scales approximately with the black hole mass and accretion rate, with a typical amplitude up to a few micro-Kelvin on angular scales around 10 arcseconds. We also discuss the possible techniques for detection of this signal which includes pointed observations from high resolution millimeter wave telescopes and cross-correlation of optical quasar catalogs with microwave maps. We perform a cross-correlation analysis of the signal, by stacking microwave maps of quasars identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We use the microwave data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe experiment to do this analysis. We perform a two-component (SZ+Dust) fit to the cross-correlation spectrum. Our results yield a best fit $y$ parameter of $(5.8 pm 1.8)imes 10^{-7}$. This signal is likely to be originating from the Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortions from intervening large scale structures. We show that the Atacama Cosmology Telescope will be able to constrain this signal with a much higher statistical significance. In this work we have shown that a traditional tool of cosmology, namely the microwave background, can be used as a potential probe of feedback from supermassive black holes, which is an interesting problem in theories of galaxy evolution

A Direct Measurement of the Mean Occupation Function of Quasars: Breaking Degeneracies between Halo Occupation Distribution Models

Recent work on quasar clustering suggests a degeneracy in the halo occupation distribution constrained from two-point correlation functions. To break this degeneracy, we make the first empirical measurement of the mean occupation function (MOF) of quasars at $z \sim 0.2$ by matching quasar positions with groups and clusters identified in the MaxBCG sample. We fit two models to the MOF, a power law and a 4-parameter model. The number distribution of quasars in host halos is close to Poisson, and the slopes of the MOF obtained from our best-fit models (for the power law case) favor a MOF that monotonically increases with halo mass. The best-fit slopes are $0.53 \pm 0.04$ and $1.03\pm 1.12$ for the power law model and the 4-parameter model, respectively. We measure the radial distribution of quasars within dark matter halos and find it to be adequately described by a power law with a slope $-2.3 \pm 0.4$. We measure the conditional luminosity function (CLF) of quasars and show that there is no evidence that quasar luminosity depends on host halo mass, similar to the inferences drawn from clustering measurements. We also measure the conditional black hole mass function (CMF) of our quasars. Although the results are consistent with no dependence on halo mass, we observe a slight indication of downsizing of the black hole mass function. The lack of halo mass dependence in the CLF and CMF shows that quasars residing in galaxy clusters have characteristic luminosity and black hole mass scales.Comment: Matches the ApJ accepted version (11 pages, 8 figures

Mean Occupation Function of High Redshift Quasars from the Planck Cluster Catalog

We characterise the distribution of quasars within dark matter halos using a direct measurement technique for the first time at redshifts as high as $z \sim 1$. Using the Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) catalogue for galaxy groups and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR12 quasar dataset, we assign host clusters/groups to the quasars and make a measurement of the mean number of quasars within dark matter halos as a function of halo mass. We find that a simple power-law fit of \log\left = (2.11 \pm 0.01) \log (M) -(32.77 \pm 0.11) can be used to model the quasar fraction in dark matter halos. This suggests that the quasar fraction increases monotonically as a function of halo mass even to redshifts as high as $z\sim 1$.Comment: Accepted for publication in PAS

The Halo Occupation Distribution of X-ray-Bright Active Galactic Nuclei: A Comparison with Luminous Quasars

We perform halo occupation distribution (HOD) modeling of the projected two-point correlation function (2PCF) of high-redshift (z~1.2) X-ray-bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the XMM-COSMOS field measured by Allevato et al. The HOD parameterization is based on low-luminosity AGN in cosmological simulations. At the median redshift of z~1.2, we derive a median mass of (1.02+0.21/-0.23)x10^{13} Msun/h for halos hosting central AGN and an upper limit of ~10% on the AGN satellite fraction. Our modeling results indicate (at the 2.5-sigma level) that X-ray AGN reside in more massive halos compared to more bolometrically luminous, optically-selected quasars at similar redshift. The modeling also yields constraints on the duty cycle of the X-ray AGN, and we find that at z~1.2 the average duration of the X-ray AGN phase is two orders of magnitude longer than that of the quasar phase. Our inferred mean occupation function of X-ray AGN is similar to recent empirical measurements with a group catalog and suggests that AGN halo occupancy increases with increasing halo mass. We project the XMM-COSMOS 2PCF measurements to forecast the required survey parameters needed in future AGN clustering studies to enable higher precision HOD constraints and determinations of key physical parameters like the satellite fraction and duty cycle. We find that N^{2}/A~5x10^{6} deg^{-2} (with N the number of AGN in a survey area of A deg^{2}) is sufficient to constrain the HOD parameters at the 10% level, which is easily achievable by upcoming and proposed X-ray surveys.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted in Ap