Probing Quiescent Massive Black Holes: Insights from Tidal Disruption
  Events
  Tidal disruption events provide a unique probe of quiescent black holes in
the nuclei of distant galaxies. The next generation of synoptic surveys will
yield a large sample of flares from the tidal disruption of stars by massive
black holes that will give insights to four key science questions: 1) What is
the assembly history of massive black holes in the universe? 2) Is there a
population of intermediate mass black holes that are the primordial seeds of
supermassive black holes? 3) How can we increase our understanding of the
physics of accretion onto black holes? 4) Can we localize sources of
gravitational waves from the detection of tidal disruption events around
massive black holes and recoiling binary black hole mergers?
