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Creators/Authors contains: "Regan, John A"

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  1. The recent detections of a large number of candidate active galactic nuclei at high redshift (i.e.  z ≳ 4 ) has increased speculation that heavy seed massive black hole formation may be a required pathway. Here we re-implement the so-called Lyman-Werner (LW) channel model of Dijkstra et al. (2014) to calculate the expected number density of massive black holes formed through this channel. We further enhance this model by extracting information relevant to the model from the πšπšŽπš—πšŠπš’πšœπšœπšŠπš—πšŒπšŽ simulation suite. πšπšŽπš—πšŠπš’πšœπšœπšŠπš—πšŒπšŽ is a high-resolution suite of simulations ideally positioned to probe the high- z universe. Finally, we compare the LW-only channel against other models in the literature. We find that the LW-only channel results in a peak number density of massive black holes of approximately at z ∼ 10 . Given the growth requirements and the duty cycle of active galactic nuclei, this means that the LW-only is likely incompatible with recent JWST measurements and can, at most, be responsible for only a small subset of high- z active galactic nuclei. Other models from the literature (e.g. rapid assembly; relative velocities between baryons and dark matter) seem therefore better positioned, at present, to explain the high frequency of massive black holes at high z
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2026