In the Dusty Recesses: Characterizing the Dark Matter Halos of Obscured Quasars via Clustering and CMB Lensing

The spatial clustering of obscured and unobscured quasars provides an interesting constraint on the connection between the growth of supermassive black holes and the evolution of galaxies and large-scale structure. In pursuit of these constraints, we update our recent measurements of quasar clustering using WISE and Planck data. We carefully assess how alterations in these missions' data reduction pipelines result in different systematics on a range of angular scales, and define samples of WISE-selected quasars that appear to be least-influenced by differences in data calibration. With these samples we analyze quasar clustering via two complementary methods; the angular autocorrelation function and cosmic microwave background lensing cross-correlations. We measure a higher bias and halo mass for obscured quasars (b ~ 2.1) as compared to unobscured quasars (b ~ 1.8). This is at odds with simple orientation models but at a reduced significance (1.5σ) as compared to our work with previous survey data. Assuming that some fraction (as high as 75%) of obscured quasars are intrinsically similar to unobscured quasars but viewed through a "dusty torus," we infer that the remaining non-torus obscured quasar population must have a large clustering bias of ~3, and inhabit typical halo masses of ~3 × 10¹³ h^-1M_⊙ at a redshift of z ~ 1. These massive halos are likely the descendants of high-mass unobscured quasars at high redshift, and will evolve into members of galaxy groups by z ~ 0. This work was supported in part by NSF grants 1211112, 1515404 and 1515364.