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Description
The CIV{lambda}{lambda}1498,1501 broad emission line is visible in optical spectra to redshifts exceeding z~5. CIV has long been known to exhibit significant displacements to the blue and these 'blueshifts' almost certainly signal the presence of strong outflows. As a consequence, single-epoch virial black hole (BH) mass estimates derived from CIV velocity widths are known to be systematically biased compared to masses from the hydrogen Balmer lines. Using a large sample of 230 high-luminosity (L_Bol_=10^45.5^-10^48^erg/s), redshift 1.5<z<4.0 quasars with both CIV and Balmer line spectra, we have quantified the bias in CIV BH masses as a function of the CIV blueshift. CIV BH masses are shown to be a factor of 5 larger than the corresponding Balmer-line masses at C IV blueshifts of 3000km/s and are overestimated by almost an order of magnitude at the most extreme blueshifts, ?=5000km/s. Using the monotonically increasing relationship between the CIV blueshift and the mass ratio BH(CIV)/BH(H{alpha}), we derive an empirical correction to all CIV BH masses. The scatter between the corrected CIV masses and the Balmer masses is 0.24dex at low CIV blueshifts (~0km/s) and just 0.10dex at high blueshifts (~3000km/s), compared to 0.40dex before the correction. The correction depends only on the CIV line properties - i.e. full width at half-maximum and blueshift - and can therefore be applied to all quasars where CIV emission line properties have been measured, enabling the derivation of unbiased virial BH-mass estimates for the majority of high-luminosity, high-redshift, spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the literature.
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