Eddington-limited accretion and the black hole mass function at redshift 6
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present discovery observations of a quasar in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey (CFHQS) at redshift z=6.44. We also use near-IR spectroscopy of nine CFHQS quasars at z~6 to determine black hole masses. These are compared with similar estimates for more luminous Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) quasars to investigate the relationship between black hole mass and quasar luminosity. We find a strong correlation between MgII FWHM and UV luminosity and that most quasars at this early epoch are accreting close to the Eddington limit. Thus these quasars appear to be in an early stage of their life cycle where they are building up their black hole mass exponentially. Combining these results with the quasar luminosity function, we derive the black hole mass function at z=6. Our black hole mass function is ~10^4 times lower than at z=0 and substantially below estimates from previous studies. The main uncertainties which could increase the black hole mass function are a larger population of obscured quasars at high-redshift than is observed at low-redshift and/or a low quasar duty cycle at z=6. In comparison, the global stellar mass function is only ~10^2 times lower at z=6 than at z=0. The difference between the black hole and stellar mass function evolution is due to either rapid early star formation which is not limited by radiation pressure as is the case for black hole growth or inefficient black hole seeding. Our work predicts that the black hole mass - stellar mass relation for a volume-limited sample of galaxies declines rapidly at very high redshift. This is in contrast to the observed increase at 4
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".