The local supermassive black hole — dark matter halo connection

We constrain the connection between supermassive black holes and their host dark matter halos at z=0 using the clustering statistics and luminosity function of AGN from the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey. We test various model assumptions of the empirical relation between black hole mass and halo mass by forward modeling black holes and AGN activity into snapshot halo catalogs from N-body simulations. We find that a model where black hole mass correlates with the peak mass of its host (sub)halo reproduces the survey statistics, as well as the observed clustering trends with black hole mass.