HET Brown Bag Seminar | Supermassive Black Holes, Dark Matter, and the Relativistic Instability.

The gravothermal core collapse of self-interacting dark matter halos provides a compelling mechanism for seeding supermassive black holes in the early Universe. In this scenario, a small fraction of a halo, approximately 1% of its mass, collapses into a dense core, which could further evolve into a black hole. In addition, I describe how the relativistic onset of dynamical instability can be diagnosed by exploiting Chandrasekhar’s criterion in both classical and quantum gases. Finally, I highlight the crucial role of space dimensionality and cosmological constant regarding the general-relativistic instability.