Paper detail

Dark Recipe for the First Giants: From Population III Stars to Early Supermassive Black Holes via Dark Matter Capture

The presence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at high redshifts ($z>5$), as revealed by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), challenges standard black hole (BH) formation scenarios. We propose a mechanism in which non-annihilating dark matter (DM) with non-gravitational interactions with the Standard Model (SM) particles accumulates inside Population III (Pop III) stars, inducing their premature collapse into BH seeds having the same mass as the parent star. Owing to their early formation, these seeds can accrete for longer periods and grow into the SMBHs observed at early cosmic times. Focusing on spin-dependent (SD) DM-proton interactions, we identify regions of parameter space that account for the observed high-redshift SMBH population, their mass function, and the SMBH-stellar mass relation. Portions of this parameter space are testable by forthcoming direct detection experiments. The scenario may lead to distinctive gravitational wave (GW) signatures from SMBH mergers, accessible to Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and pulsar timing array (PTA) observations.