Title: The demographics of broad line quasars
Speaker: Dr. Yue Shen (Clay Fellow)
Affiliation: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) of the United States
Time:Aug, 17th, 2pm
Location:Middle conference room, 3rd floor
Abstract: The demographics of broad line quasars is one of the central topics in studying the cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes. This is traditionally studied in terms of the quasar luminosity function. Reverberation mapping studies of local AGNs have enabled us to estimate the masses of broad line quasars using virial mass estimators based on single-epoch spectroscopy, and thus it has become possible to study the evolution of the SMBH population in the 2-dimensional mass-luminosity plane. I will present some recent work on quasar demographics in the mass-luminosity plane, with BH masses estimated using virial mass estimators. I will highlight some caveats of these virial mass estimators in estimating BH masses, and present a forward modeling approach to determine the intrinsic distribution of quasars in the mass-luminosity plane.
