[SME-PB] AGN demogr. and evolution in the era of large-scale surveys (C)

Great progress has been made on the demographics and co-evolution of AGN since the turn of the millennium, greatly enhanced by multi-object spectroscopic follow-up observations of AGN selected over a range of wavelengths (e.g., X-ray, optical, IR, and radio). Large-scale surveys such as SDSS already provide robust optically selected AGN samples of 10,000s - 100,000s, allowing researchers to place AGN within the broader galaxy and large-scale environments, and follow-up programmes started/planned with DESI, WEAVE, 4MOST, MOONS, and Euclid will push to yet fainter sensitivities with larger samples. This great explosion of data is already providing us with an unprecedented census of the AGN population, and allowing us to track their demographics and properties across cosmic time, with spectroscopically identified samples numbering in the millions.

From a plethora of studies over the last decade it has become clear that AGN co-evolve with their host galaxies. To develop a more complete picture of galaxy evolution it is therefore vital that we understand what triggers the AGN phase of a supermassive black hole’s existence, and how AGN fuelling and feedback affect the host galaxy. Thanks to observations of a range of galaxy morphologies, it is clear that this co-evolution can occur both via merger-driven and merger-free pathways. Whilst less is known about the merger-free mechanism, we know that this pathway dominates black hole growth. However, this is difficult to observe, since galaxies with a completely merger-free history spanning at least the lifetime of their AGN are not common.

This session will discuss AGN from a range of viewpoints, including their co-evolution with their host galaxies, studies at different wavelengths, the potential of new and upcoming facilities and surveys, the promise of machine learning techniques to deal with the vast new datasets, and new theoretical developments. Amongst the questions that we hope to answer are: What are the galactic and large-scale environments of AGN and how do these change as a function of redshift, mass, luminosity, mass-accretion rate, etc? Which pathways exist to facilitate co-evolution between galaxies and black holes? How complete is our cosmic AGN census, when combining new spectroscopic measurements with multi-wavelength signatures? What effective methods and techniques can we use to analyse and interpret the vast datasets? Overall, we aim to review progress made over the last decade, and to plan for the effective exploitation of the data from upcoming facilities.