Imprints of the quasar structure in time-delay light curves: Microlensing-aided reverberation mapping

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel photometric reverberation mapping method using microlensing effects in lensed quasars to measure the broad line region size, enhancing AGN structure studies with single-band data.

Contribution

It presents a new technique leveraging microlensing-induced flux contrast changes to disentangle emission regions, enabling reverberation mapping from photometric data alone.

Findings

Method successfully estimates broad line region size in simulations.

Microlensing effects can be distinguished from intrinsic variability.

Time-delay measurements remain accurate despite microlensing effects.

Abstract

Owing to the advent of large area photometric surveys, the possibility to use broad band photometric data, instead of spectra, to measure the size of the broad line region of active galactic nuclei, has raised a large interest. We describe here a new method using time-delay lensed quasars where one or several images are affected by microlensing due to stars in the lensing galaxy. Because microlensing decreases (or increases) the flux of the continuum compared to the broad line region, it changes the contrast between these two emission components. We show that this effect can be used to effectively disentangle the intrinsic variability of those two regions, offering the opportunity to perform reverberation mapping based on single band photometric data. Based on simulated light curves generated using a damped random walk model of quasar variability, we show that measurement of the size of the broad line region can be achieved using this method, provided one spectrum has been obtained independently during the monitoring. This method is complementary to photometric reverberation mapping and could also be extended to multi-band data. Because the effect described above produces a variability pattern in difference light curves between pairs of lensed images which is correlated with the time-lagged continuum variability, it can potentially produce systematic errors in measurement of time delays between pairs of lensed images. Simple simulations indicate that time-delay measurement techniques which use a sufficiently flexible model for the extrinsic variability are not affected by this effect and produce accurate time delays.