Jake Doherty Qualifier presentation

Abstract: An open problem in astrophysics is explaining the growth of supermassive black holes (BH) present at remarkably early times in the universe. In this project, we explore the possibility of growing supermassive BH seeds during a period of expansion dominated by a scalar field. This was done through numerical relativity simulations involving a BH in a cosmological space-time driven by a scalar field with an inflationary-type potential.