Blindly Detecting Merging Supermassive Black Holes with Radio Surveys

Supermassive black holes presumably grow through numerous mergers throughout cosmic time. During each merger, supermassive black hole binaries are surrounded by a circumbinary accretion disk that imposes a significant (~1e4 G for a binary of 1e8 Msun) magnetic field. The motion of the binary through that field will convert the field energy to Poynting flux, with a luminosity ~1e43 erg/s (B/1e4 G)^2 (M/1e8 Msun)^2, some of which may emerge as synchrotron emission at frequencies near 1 GHz where current and planned wide-field radio surveys will operate. We find that the short timescales of many mergers will limit their detectability with most planned blind surveys to <1 per year over the whole sky, independent of the details of the emission process and flux distribution. Including an optimistic estimate for the radio flux makes detection even less likely, with