Formation of intermediate-mass black holes through runaway collisions in the first star clusters

We study the formation of massive black holes in the first star clusters. We first locate star-forming gas clouds in protogalactic haloes of ≳10⁷ M_⊙ in cosmological hydrodynamics simulations and use them to generate the initial conditions for star clusters with masses of ∼10⁵ M_⊙. We then perform a series of direct-tree hybrid N-body simulations to follow runaway stellar collisions in the dense star clusters. In all the cluster models except one, runaway collisions occur within a few million years, and the mass of the central, most massive star reaches ∼400-1900 M_⊙. Such very massive stars collapse to leave intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). The diversity of the final masses may be attributed to the differences in a few basic properties of the host haloes such as mass, central gas velocity dispersion and mean gas density of the central core. Finally, we derive the IMBH mass to cluster mass ratios, and compare them with the observed black hole to bulge mass ratios in the present-day Universe.