Gravitational radiation from super-massive black-hole binaries

Abstract

Recent observational evidence ties the mass of supermassive black‐holes to the circular velocities of their host dark‐matter halos, and suggests that this relation is independent of redshift. We show that a simple model including the combination of the black‐hole — circular velocity relation with the dark matter halo mass function and merger rate reproduces the details of the optical and X‐ray quasar luminosity functions at high redshift within a standard Lambda‐CDM cosmology. A similar approach can be used to estimate the expected rate of gravitational wave emission from merging super‐massive black‐holes. These calculations suggest an event rate for the LISA satellite that may be as high as..