Characterising the long-term variability of blazars in leptonic models

Abstract

Most research on blazar variability focuses on individual flares to explain acceleration and radiation mechanisms and improve on current models. These short-time events (being minutes, hours, or days) might not be representative of the underlying mechanisms causing small-amplitude variability and/or continuous emission which is present most of the time. We will therefore investigate long-term (months to years) variability of blazar emission in the framework of current leptonic blazar models. For this purpose, we introduce generated time-dependent parameter variations which are based on typical Power Spectral Densities (PSDs) associated with the variability of accretion flows. The PSDs from the resulting light curves are analyzed and compared to one another, as well as the PSD of the input variation. Correlations between light curves are also investigated to aid identification of characteristic variation patterns associated with leptonic models