Optical Spectral Variability of Blazars

Abstract

It is well established that blazars show flux variations in the complete electromagnetic (EM) spectrum on all possible time scales rang- ing from a few tens of minutes to several years. Here, we report the review of optical flux and spectral variability properties of different classes of blazars on IDV and STV time-scales. Our analysis show HSPs are less variable in optical bands as compared to LSPs. Also, we investigated the spectral slope variability and found that the average spectral slopes of LSPs showed a good agreement with the synchrotron self-Compton loss-dominated model. However, spectra of the HSPs and FSRQs have significant additional emission components. In general, spectra of BL Lacs get flatter when they become brighter, while for FSRQs the opposite trend appears to hold.