Gravitational Wave Signals from the First Massive Black Hole Seeds

Abstract: Recent numerical simulations reveal that the isothermal collapse of pristine gas in atomic cooling haloes may result in stellar binaries of supermassive stars with $M_* \gtrsim 10^4\ \mathrm{M}{\odot}$. For the first time, we compute the in-situ merger rate for such massive black hole remnants by combining their abundance and multiplicity estimates. For black holes with initial masses in the range $10^{4-6} \ \mathrm{M}{\odot}$ merging at redshifts $z \gtrsim 15$ our optimistic model predicts that LISA should be able to detect 0.6 mergers per year. This rate of detection can be attributed, without confusion, to the in-situ mergers of seeds from the collapse of very massive stars. Equally, in the case where LISA observes no mergers from heavy seeds at $z \gtrsim 15$ we can constrain the combined number density, multiplicity, and coalesence times of these high-redshift systems. This letter proposes gravitational wave signatures as a means to constrain theoretical models and processes that govern the abundance of massive black hole seeds in the early Universe.