@phdthesis{Schulze2011,
  author    = {Schulze, Andreas},
  title     = {Demographics of supermassive black holes},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-54464},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {Supermassive black holes are a fundamental component of the universe in general and of galaxies in particular. Almost every massive galaxy harbours a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in its center. Furthermore, there is a close connection between the growth of the SMBH and the evolution of its host galaxy, manifested in the relationship between the mass of the black hole and various properties of the galaxy's spheroid component, like its stellar velocity dispersion, luminosity or mass. Understanding this relationship and the growth of SMBHs is essential for our picture of galaxy formation and evolution. In this thesis, I make several contributions to improve our knowledge on the census of SMBHs and on the coevolution of black holes and galaxies. The first route I follow on this road is to obtain a complete census of the black hole population and its properties. Here, I focus particularly on active black holes, observable as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) or quasars. These are found in large surveys of the sky. In this thesis, I use one of these surveys, the Hamburg/ESO survey (HES), to study the AGN population in the local volume (z~0). The demographics of AGN are traditionally represented by the AGN luminosity function, the distribution function of AGN at a given luminosity. I determined the local (z<0.3) optical luminosity function of so-called type 1 AGN, based on the broad band B_J magnitudes and AGN broad Halpha emission line luminosities, free of contamination from the host galaxy. I combined this result with fainter data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and constructed the best current optical AGN luminosity function at z~0. The comparison of the luminosity function with higher redshifts supports the current notion of 'AGN downsizing', i.e. the space density of the most luminous AGN peaks at higher redshifts and the space density of less luminous AGN peaks at lower redshifts. However, the AGN luminosity function does not reveal the full picture of active black hole demographics. This requires knowledge of the physical quantities, foremost the black hole mass and the accretion rate of the black hole, and the respective distribution functions, the active black hole mass function and the Eddington ratio distribution function. I developed a method for an unbiased estimate of these two distribution functions, employing a maximum likelihood technique and fully account for the selection function. I used this method to determine the active black hole mass function and the Eddington ratio distribution function for the local universe from the HES. I found a wide intrinsic distribution of black hole accretion rates and black hole masses. The comparison of the local active black hole mass function with the local total black hole mass function reveals evidence for 'AGN downsizing', in the sense that in the local universe the most massive black holes are in a less active stage then lower mass black holes. The second route I follow is a study of redshift evolution in the black hole-galaxy relations. While theoretical models can in general explain the existence of these relations, their redshift evolution puts strong constraints on these models. Observational studies on the black hole-galaxy relations naturally suffer from selection effects. These can potentially bias the conclusions inferred from the observations, if they are not taken into account. I investigated the issue of selection effects on type 1 AGN samples in detail and discuss various sources of bias, e.g. an AGN luminosity bias, an active fraction bias and an AGN evolution bias. If the selection function of the observational sample and the underlying distribution functions are known, it is possible to correct for this bias. I present a fitting method to obtain an unbiased estimate of the intrinsic black hole-galaxy relations from samples that are affected by selection effects. Third, I try to improve our census of dormant black holes and the determination of their masses. One of the most important techniques to determine the black hole mass in quiescent galaxies is via stellar dynamical modeling. This method employs photometric and kinematic observations of the galaxy and infers the gravitational potential from the stellar orbits. This method can reveal the presence of the black hole and give its mass, if the sphere of the black hole's gravitational influence is spatially resolved. However, usually the presence of a dark matter halo is ignored in the dynamical modeling, potentially causing a bias on the determined black hole mass. I ran dynamical models for a sample of 12 galaxies, including a dark matter halo. For galaxies for which the black hole's sphere of influence is not well resolved, I found that the black hole mass is systematically underestimated when the dark matter halo is ignored, while there is almost no effect for galaxies with well resolved sphere of influence.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Dubinovska2013,
  author    = {Dubinovska, Daria},
  title     = {Optical surveys of AGN and their host galaxies},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-64739},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {This thesis rests on two large Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) surveys. The first survey deals with galaxies that host low-level AGNs (LLAGN) and aims at identifying such galaxies by quantifying their variability. While numerous studies have shown that AGNs can be variable at all wavelengths, the nature of the variability is still not well understood. Studying the properties of LLAGNs may help to understand better galaxy evolution, and how AGNs transit between active and inactive states. In this thesis, we develop a method to extract variability properties of AGNs. Using multi-epoch deep photometric observations, we subtract the contribution of the host galaxy at each epoch to extract variability and estimate AGN accretion rates. This pipeline will be a powerful tool in connection with future deep surveys such as PANSTARS. The second study in this thesis describes a survey of X-ray selected AGN hosts at redshifts z>1.5 and compares them to quiescent galaxies. This survey aims at studying environments, sizes and morphologies of star-forming high-redshift AGN hosts in the COSMOS Survey at the epoch of peak AGN activity. Between redshifts 1.5<z<3.8, the COSMOS HST/ACS imaging probes the UV regime, where separating the AGN flux from its host galaxy is very challenging. Nevertheless, we successfully derived the structural properties of 249 AGN hosts using two-dimensional surface-brightness profile fitting with the GALFIT package. This is the largest sample of AGN hosts at redshift z>1.5 to date. We analyzed the evolution of structural parameters of AGN and non-AGN host galaxies with redshift, and compared their disturbance rates to identify the more probable AGN triggering mechanism in the 43.5<log_10 L_X<45 luminosity range. We also conducted mock AGN and quiescent galaxies observations to determine errors and corrections for the derived parameters. We find that the size-absolute magnitude relations of AGN hosts and non-AGN galaxies are very similar, with estimated mean sizes in both samples decreasing by ~50\% between redshifts z=1.5 and z=3.5. Morphological classification of both active and quiescent galaxies shows that the majority of the AGN host galaxies are disc-dominated, with disturbance rates that are significantly lower than among the non-AGN galaxies. Such a finding suggests that Major Mergers are probably not responsible for triggering AGN accretion in most of these galaxies. Other secular mechanisms should therefore be responsible.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{AcciariArlenAuneetal.2014,
  author    = {Acciari, V. A. and Arlen, T. and Aune, T. and Benbow, W. and Bird, R. and Bouvier, A. and Bradbury, S. M. and Buckley, J. H. and Bugaev, V. and de la Calle Perez, I. and Carter-Lewis, D. A. and Cesarini, A. and Ciupik, L. and Collins-Hughes, E. and Connolly, M. P. and Cui, W. and Duke, C. and Dumm, J. and Falcone, A. and Federici, Simone and Fegan, D. J. and Fegan, S. J. and Finley, J. P. and Finnegan, G. and Fortson, L. and Gaidos, J. and Galante, N. and Gall, D. and Gibbs, K. and Gillanders, G. H. and Griffin, S. and Grube, J. and Gyuk, G. and Hanna, D. and Horan, D. and Humensky, T. B. and Kaaret, P. and Kertzman, M. and Khassen, Y. and Kieda, D. and Krawczynski, H. and Krennrich, F. and Lang, M. J. and McEnery, J. E. and Madhavan, A. S. and Moriarty, P. and Nelson, T. and Ong, R. A. and Orr, M. and Otte, A. N. and Perkins, J. S. and Petry, D. and Pichel, A. and Pohl, M. and Quinn, J. and Ragan, K. and Reynolds, T. and Roache, E. and Rovero, A. and Schroedter, M. and Sembroski, G. H. and Smith, A. and Telezhinsky, Igor O. and Theiling, M. and Toner, J. and Tyler, J. and Varlotta, A. and Vivier, M. and Wakely, S. P. and Ward, J. E. and Weekes, T. C. and Weinstein, A. and Welsing, R. and Williams, D. A. and Wissel, S.},
  title     = {Observation of Markarian 421 in TeV gamma rays over a 14-year time span},
  series = {Astroparticle physics},
  volume    = {54},
  journal   = {Astroparticle physics},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0927-6505},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.astropartphys.2013.10.004},
  pages     = {1 -- 10},
  year      = {2014},
  abstract  = {The variability of the blazar Markarian 421 in TeV gamma rays over a 14-year time period has been explored with the Whipple 10 m telescope. It is shown that the dynamic range of its flux variations is large and similar to that in X-rays. A correlation between the X-ray and TeV energy bands is observed during some bright flares and when the complete data sets are binned on long timescales. The main database consists of 878.4 h of observation with the Whipple telescope, spread over 783 nights. The peak energy response of the telescope was 400 GeV with 20\% uncertainty. This is the largest database of any TeV-emitting active galactic nucleus (AGN) and hence was used to explore the variability profile of Markarian 421. The tithe-averaged flux from Markarian 421 over this period was 0.446 +/- 0.008 Crab flux units. The flux exceeded 10 Crab flux units on three separate occasions. For the 2000-2001 season the average flux reached 1.86 Crab units, while in the 1996-1997 season the average flux was only 0.23 Crab units.},
  language  = {en}
}