Secularly powered outflows from AGN: the dominance of non-merger driven
  supermassive black hole growth
  Recent observations and simulations have revealed the dominance of secular
processes over mergers in driving the growth of both supermassive black holes
(SMBH) and galaxy evolution. Here we obtain narrowband imaging of AGN powered
outflows in a sample of $12$ galaxies with disk-dominated morphologies, whose
history is assumed to be merger-free. We detect outflows in $10/12$ sources in
narrow band imaging of the [OIII] $5007 \unicode{x212B}$ emission using filters
on the Shane-3m telescope. We calculate a mean outflow rate for these AGN of
$0.95\pm0.14~\rm{M}_{\odot}~\rm{yr}^{-1}$. This exceeds the mean accretion rate
of their SMBHs $0.054\pm0.039~\rm{M}_{\odot}~\rm{yr}^{-1}$) by a factor of
$\sim18$. Assuming that the galaxy must provide at least enough material to
power both the AGN and the outflow, this gives a lower limit on the average
inflow rate of $\sim1.01\pm0.14~\rm{M}_{\odot}~\rm{yr}^{-1}$, a rate which
simulations show can be achieved by bars, spiral arms and cold accretion. We
compare our disk dominated sample to a sample of nearby AGN with merger
dominated histories and show that the black hole accretion rates in our sample
are 5 times higher ($4.2\sigma$) and the outflow rates are 5 times lower
($2.6\sigma$}. We suggest that this could be a result of the geometry of the
smooth, planar inflow in a secular dominated system, which is both spinning up
the black hole to increase accretion efficiency and less affected by feedback
from the outflow, than in a merger-driven system with chaotic quasi-spherical
inflows. This work provides further evidence that secular processes are
sufficient to fuel SMBH growth.
