Uncovering hidden black holes with extragalactic X-ray surveys

Despite remarkable progress over the past decades, our picture of black hole evolution has remained incomplete due to the challenges of detecting the mysterious "elusive" AGN that are highly obscured or hidden beneath the light of their host galaxies. I will present recent studies by our group and colleagues that use X-ray and multiwavelength extragalactic surveys (particularly with Chandra, NuSTAR, and WISE) to uncover the full population of AGN. Including these elusive AGN in our picture has helped illustrate that AGN accretion is a surprisingly universal, yet highly stochastic process, and has shown that AGN obscuration is linked to processes in galaxy evolution. I will conclude by forecasting the exciting science in this area that will be enabled by future observatories including the Lynx concept X-ray mission. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation through grant numbers 1515404 and 1554584, and NASA through grant numbers NNX15AP24G, NNX15AU32H, and NNX16AN48G.