The response of the broad emission line region to ionizing continuum variations – III. An atlas of transfer functions

Abstract

According to the reverberation model for broad emission line variability in active galactic nuclei, the emission-line luminosity at a given epoch may be expressed formally as the convolution of the input ionizing continuum light curve with a transfer function, the form of which depends on the properties of the emitting material. Here, transfer functions are calculated for several simple models of the broad-line region characterized by various geometrical configurations and velocity fields