The brief era of direct collapse black hole formation
  It has been proposed that the first, intermediate-mass ($\approx
10^{5-6}~M_\odot$) black holes might form through direct collapse of unpolluted
gas in atomic-cooling halos exposed to a strong Lyman-Werner (LW) or
near-infrared (NIR) radiation. As these systems are expected to be
Compton-thick, photons above 13.6 eV are largely absorbed and re-processed into
lower energy bands. It follows that direct collapse black holes (DCBHs) are
very bright in the LW/NIR bands, typically outshining small high-redshift
galaxies by more than 10 times. Once the first DCBHs form, they then trigger a
runaway process of further DCBH formation, producing a sudden rise in their
cosmic mass density. The universe enters the "DCBH era" at $z \approx 20$ when
a large fraction of atomic-cooling halos are experiencing DCBH formation. By
combining the clustering properties of the radiation sources with Monte Carlo
simulations we show that in this scenario the DCBH mass density rises from
$\sim 5$~$M_\odot$ Mpc$^{-3}$ at $z\sim 30$ to the peak value $\sim5\times10^5
M_\odot$ Mpc$^{-3}$ at $z \sim 14$ in our fiducial model. However, the
abundance of \textit{active} (accreting) DCBHs drops after $z \sim 14$, as gas
in the potential formation sites (unpolluted halos with virial temperature
slightly above $10^4$~K) is photoevaporated. This effect almost completely
suppresses DCBH formation after $z\sim 13$. The DCBH formation era lasts only
$\approx 150$ Myr, but it might crucially provide the seeds of the supermassive
black holes (SMBHs) powering $z\sim6$ quasars.
