Simulations of the Growth of Black Holes and Feedback from Active Galactic Nuclei

We present and test a numerical method that self-consistently tracks the growth of supermassive black holes (BHs) in numerical simulations, and discuss redshift zero results from a large suite of cosmological simulations. We show that in high mass galaxies the properties of the redshift zero BH population are insensitive to the assumed BH seed generation mechanism and additionally demonstrate that this insensitivity occurs because, in the simulations, BHs grow until they have injected a critical amount of energy into the surrounding gas, at which point they can effectively regulate their growth.