Clustering of z~6.6 Quasars and [O III] Emitters Constrains Host Halo Masses and Duty Cycles in 25 ASPIRE Fields

Abstract

We use data from the JWST ASPIRE Wide Field Slitless Spectroscopy (WFSS) program to measure the auto-correlation function of [O,{\sc iii}] emitters at 5.3$<z<$7.0 and the quasar--[O,{\sc iii}] emitter cross-correlation around 25 ASPIRE quasars (6.51$<z<$6.82; $⟨z⟩=6.6$). We use synthetic source injection to calibrate the selection function, which we combine with the large-volume FLAMINGO-10k simulation (2.8,cGpc box) to construct realistic mock observations. Our simulation-based approach captures nonlinear structure growth and scale-dependent bias on small scales and derives covariance matrices that include cosmic variance. The clustering yields correlation lengths of $r_0^{\mathrm{GG}}=4.7^{+0.4}-0.5,h^{-1}$,cMpc for the [O,{\sc iii}] auto-correlation with fixed slope $\gamma \mathrm{GG}=1.8$, and $r_0^{\mathrm{QG}}=8.7^{+0.8}-0.9,h^{-1}$,cMpc for the quasar--[O,{\sc iii}] cross-correlation with $\gamma \mathrm{QG}=2.0$. We infer $\log (M_{h,\min }^{[\mathrm{O},\mathrm{III}]}/M_{\odot })=10.5^{+0.1}-0.1$ for [O,{\sc iii}] emitters and $\log (M{h,\min }^{\mathrm{QSO}}/M_{\odot })=12.1^{+0.3}-0.4$ for quasars. These imply duty cycles of $2.5^{+1.0}-0.8$,per,cent for [O,{\sc iii}] emitters and $0.3^{+4.0}-0.3$,per,cent for quasars, corresponding to UV-bright lifetimes of $t\mathrm{Q}=2.6_{-2.5}^{+30}$,Myr (less than 10,per,cent of a Salpeter $e$-folding time). The results indicate that the observed UV-luminous phase contributes little to total SMBH growth, placing tight constraints on early black-hole formation.

23 pages, 10 figures, submitted to MNRAS