Speaker
Description
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 mecha-
nisms 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 investi-
gated to aid identification of characteristic variation patterns associated with leptonic
models. The resulting multi-wavelength PSDs were found to follow the input variation
PSD trend closely, however, it presented no clear distinctions between the varied pa-
rameters. The multi-wavelength cross-correlations showed significant difference among
the varied parameters. We therefore conclude that the PSDs are plausible candidates
for extracting the variational trends of variability progenitors while multi-wavelength
cross-correlations would be a plausible diagnostic for identifying radiative mechanism
characteristics as well as the varying quantity in the emission region.
