Growing Black Holes in a Decaying Vacuum

In cosmological models with a time-varying cosmological constant, the stress-energy tensor of matter is not conserved due to coupling between matter and vacuum energy. This non-conservation leads to the possibility of an energy transfer from the vacuum energy to ordinary matter. It is therefore natural to expect that a dynamical vacuum energy can also affect the evolution of black holes. In this work, we investigate the growth of black holes in such a background of a decaying vacuum. Allowing a direct exchange of energy between black holes and the decaying vacuum enables supermassive black holes (SMBHs) to form easily in the early universe.