Supermassive black hole seeds from direct collapse of CDM-curvature peaks
Abstract
We study black hole (BH) formation from the nonlinear growth and collapse of primordial perturbations during the matter-dominated era. Modelling cold dark matter (CDM) as pressureless dust, we describe the collapse in a fully nonlinear relativistic framework using the Lema\^{i}tre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) and quasi-spherical Szekeres solutions as exact perturbations of a spatially-flat Friedmann-Lema\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) CDM background. At first order in relativistic scalar perturbation theory, the growing mode of any relevant quantity can be expressed in terms of the conserved gauge-invariant curvature perturbation , which acts as a potential for the 3-curvature of hypersurfaces orthogonal to the matter 4-velocity. We use this result to express the active gravitational mass and curvature functions of the LTB and Szekeres models in terms of the initial values of and its spatial derivatives. From these initial curvature data we derive: (i) the turn-around, collapse, and apparent-horizon formation times, and (ii) the regularity conditions required for BH formation. We show that sinusoidal and Gaussian profiles do not provide viable BH-forming channels, whereas broad compensated curvature peaks, naturally predicted by peak theory, do. We then estimate the formation times of massive BH seeds produced by the direct collapse of primordial CDM curvature peaks, finding full BH formation at redshifts , with core collapse beginning at . Finally, we characterize the local dynamics and singularity type of the collapse (point-like, cigar-like, or pancake-like) directly from the initial comoving curvature data, clarifying the role of the initial shear in selecting the collapse end-state.
Comments: 34 pages, 10 figures
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.30145,
title = {Supermassive black hole seeds from direct collapse of CDM-curvature peaks},
author = {Marco Galoppo and Marco Bruni and Tomohiro Harada},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30145},
year = {2026}
}