The Physical Connection between Cosmic Gas Flows, Supermassive Black Holes Growth, and Galaxy Evolution

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022The circumgalactic medium (CGM) represents a key interface in the processes of galactic evolution. Here, the gas which enters galaxies through mergers and filaments and the gas expelled from a disk through stellar and black hole feedback intersect, maintaining a reservoir that will shape a galaxy throughout its lifetime. However, due to the diffuse and difficult-to- observe nature of this gaseous region, the degree to which galactic processes impact it are still uncertain, making the CGM a natural laboratory for testing the impact of different feedback models. The CGM of Milky Way-mass galaxies are the best targets for these analyses as these galaxies lie at the turnover mass during which galaxies switch from being dominated by stellar processes and become dominated by supermassive black hole (SMBH) or active galactic nucleus (AGN) processes.My focus of my thesis work is in exploring the impact of supermassive black hole (SMBH) feedback on the evolution of Milky Way-mass (MW-mass) galaxies in hydrodynamic sim- ulations. We use simulations from the N-body+Smoothed particle hydrodynamics code, ChaNGa, and include a 25 Mpc cosmological volume, Romulus25, and a suite of ”genet- ically modified” (GM) galaxies. These GM galaxies originate from nearly identical initial conditions resulting in minor modifications to their accretion histories that maintain the large scale structure and final halo mass of the original simulation. We find that (1) the SMBH propagates metals from the disk out into CGM, (2) the mass of metals retained by the galaxy depends on its deviation from the M-sigma relation, and (3) black hole accretion histories can be influenced by larger scale galaxy accretion physics, which work in tandem to quench star formation