Overall the progress of the ERC project has been excellent. The COEVOLUTION team had the necessary expertise in all areas of the ERC grant and it collaborated with a number of PhD students (~10), master students (~5) and a number of external collaborators. The team was very productive with 48 publications so far in high impact journals and was very active in disseminating scientific results, attending or organizing over 80 international conferences. The team was heavily involved in organizing a local scientific workshop which brought international experts to the team's host institution as well as co-organizing a Special Session at EWASS in 2018. In 2019 PI organized a major international symposium whose summary was covered in the Nature journal. The team has been very successful in winning high performance computing grants. The team was heavily engaged with public outreach as well, reaching over 1200 people a year during the Cambridge Science Festival.
In terms of the key scientific achievements, here is a summary of a few highlights.
Colin DeGraf has mainly worked on Area A of the ERC grant. He has developed novel black hole seed models and demonstrated their impact in state-of-the-art simulations. This is very relevant for the cosmic black hole merger rates that future gravitational wave detectors will be able to probe (IPTA, LISA), and this work allowed us to join the LISA consortium. This work is summarized in DeGraf & Sijacki, 2020, MNRAS, 491, 49. More recently, Colin also worked on the emerging field of multi-messenger astrophysics, demonstrating the link between merging black holes and morphological signatures of their host galaxies, with key results summarized in DeGraf et al., 2021, MNRAS, 503, 3629. Colin DeGraf has also worked on Area B of the ERC grant, exploring the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies. This resulted in two published papers.
Martin Bourne has mainly worked on Area C of the ERC grant. He has developed an entirely novel method of black hole heating via jets based on the work by Curtis & Sijacki, 2015, MNRAS, 454, 3445. Given the timeliness he has applied this method to compare against the Hitomi (former Astro-H) mission and to constrain the properties of galaxy clusters, heating and turbulence. This work has been published in Bourne & Sijacki, 2017, MNRAS, 472, 4707, Bourne, Sijacki & Puchwein, 2019, MNRAS, 490, 3 and Bourne & Sijacki, 2021, MNRAS, 506, 4 and resulted in Royal Astronomical Society Press Release.
Martin Bourne has done further work related to Area B of the ERC grant exploring the interplay between star formation in galaxies and AGN feedback. This resulted in 4 published papers where specifically emphasis has been placed on the nature of AGN outflows. This together with our efforts with external collaborators (Costa et al. 2018, MNRAS, 473, 4197) has put us in the leading position of theoretically interpreting observational data and currently there is an ongoing fruitful collaboration there. Further more, together with our PhD students Sophie Koudmani and Rosie Talbot, Martin has worked on a novel field of AGN feedback in dwarf galaxies and on the first ever implementation of Blandford-Znajek jets in galaxy formation simulations which resulted in 3 published paper and one submitted.
Davide Fiacconi has developed a novel method to incorporate the effect of black hole spin and its imprint on black hole accretion and feedback. This model is needed for diverse parts of Area A, B and C. The model is fully functional now and a paper has been published (Fiacconi, Sijacki, Pringle, 2018, MNRAS, 477, 3807). Note that this model is especially timely given the recent detection of gravitational waves, as it will also permit to simulate merging black holes with a spin. Davide also worked on the evolution of galaxies in the early Universe and on the nature of X-ray sources pertinent to Area B of the ERC grant which resulted in 2 published papers.
