Seeding Supermassive Black Holes
Gianni Sims
Florida Atlantic University
gsims2021@fau.edu
Abstract: The formation of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is a key open problem in galaxy evolution, with light and heavy seeding models predicting distinct black hole occupation fractions (BHOFs). We use multiwavelength observations from the LSST Deep Drilling Fields to measure the AGN occupation fraction and estimate the BHOF at z < 1. By applying a hierarchical Bayesian model, we find that the corrected AGN fraction peaks near 1011M⊙ and declines at lower masses, favoring heavy seed scenarios for massive galaxies. These results provide new observational constraints on SMBH seeding and highlight the value of combining deep extragalactic surveys with probabilistic modeling.