Jet enhanced accretion growth of supermassive black holes

We investigate the effect of a disc-driven jet on the accretion growth of cosmological supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The presence of a jet enhances the mass growth rate because for a given luminosity, the mass accretion rate, Ṁa, is higher (or equivalently, the radiative efficiency ǫr is lower for a fixed Ṁa) than that predicted by standard accretion disc theory. As jets carry away very little of the accreting matter, a larger proportion of the rest mass can reach the black hole during episodes of jet activity. We show quantitatively that the conditions required to grow a rapidly spinning black hole to a mass ≈ 10M⊙ by redshift z ≈ 6, whilst satisfying the observational constraint ǫr ∼ 0.1, are considerably less restrictive for jet-enhanced disc accretion than for standard disc accretion, which requires implausibly high super-Eddington accretion rates. Furthermore, jet-enhanced accretion growth offers a viable explanation for the observed correlation between black hole mass and radio-loudness of quasars.