General physical characteristics of gamma- ray emitting beamed AGNs in fermi era a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of doctor of philosophy to the dept.ment of physics, university of Calicut, Calicut Vaidehi Sharan Paliya [Ph.D Thesis]

Doctor of Philosophy University of Calicut, Calicut, Kerala 2016

The research work presented in this thesis is aimed to provide a detailed under-
standing of the radiative processes powering the jets of the blazars, a class of AGNs

with jet pointed towards the line of sight to the observer. Another important aim

of this work is to study the multi-frequency properties of a new class of γ-ray emit-
ting narrow-line Seyfert 1 (γ-NLSy1) galaxies using various observational tools and

to compare them with that known from powerful blazars.
The goal of understanding the physical characteristics of blazars is achieved by
studying the broadband flux variability and spectral energy distribution (SED)
modeling of a carefully selected sample of blazars. The aim of the broadband
variability study is to provide a general physical scenario, which allows one to
put the observed variation from blazars across several decades of frequencies in a
coherent context. Extremely fast hr scale flux variations are observed from all the
sources studied here, including nearby BL Lac object Mrk 421 (z = 0.03) which
showed minute scale hard X-ray (3−79 keV) flux variability during its 2013 April
X-ray outburst. Moreover, by adopting a SED modeling approach, attempts are
made to understand the causes of high amplitude γ-ray flux variations observed
from these objects. To do this, a simple one zone leptonic emission model was also
developed during the course of the thesis. The main reason of the 2014 April and
2015 June γ-ray outbursts of 3C 279 (z = 0.536) and 2011 December γ-ray flare
of distant blazar S5 0836+71 (z = 2.17) is found to be due to sudden acceleration
of the jet. On the other hand, minute scale variability seen from Mrk 421 is
explained on the basis of magnetic energy dissipation and reconnection events.
The multi-wavelength observations of 3C 279 revealed that a single zone leptonic
emission model successfully reproduces the γ-ray flares of 2014 April and 2015
June, however, it fails to explain the uncorrelated flux variations and a hard γ-ray
spectrum seen during 2013 December event. A two zone leptonic emission model
is used to match the observations. All these observations hint for the presence of a variety of the radiative processes working in the 3C 279 jet (and possibly in other
sources as well) and their dominance over each other, as seen during different high
activity periods.
The launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope in the year 2008 led to the first

detection of γ-ray emission with high confidence from about half-a-dozen radio-
loud NLSy1 galaxies. This discovery clearly indicates the presence of relativistic

jets in these sources similar to that of blazars. With the motivation to understand
the nature of γ-NLSy1 galaxies vis-a-vis blazars, few diagnostic tests are carried
out, namely, intranight optical variability (INOV), γ-ray spectral properties, and
broadband SED modeling. It is found that: (1) these sources show large amplitude
(>3%) INOV with a duty cycle of about 80%, (2) their γ-ray spectra exhibit a
significant curvature, and (3) their broadband SEDs have the typical double hump
structure and the high energy hump can be explained due to external Compton

process. Thus, based on the observations covering a wide range of the electromag-
netic spectrum, it can be concluded that γ-NLSy1 galaxies have all the properties

similar to blazars and could well be the low black hole mass counterparts of flat
spectrum radio quasars.