The Ultraviolet/optical variability of steep-spectrum radio quasars: the
  change in accretion rate ?
  Context. The steep-spectrum radio quasars (SSRQs) are powerful radio sources,
with thermal emission from accretion disk and jet nonthermal emission likely
both contributing in the Ultraviolet (UV)/optical luminosity, however the
former may play a dominant role. While the UV/optical variability of SSRQs has
been poorly studied, little is known on the mechanism of their variability.
Aims. We investigate the mechanism of the UV/optical variability of SSRQs.
Methods. A sample of eighteen SSRQs has been established in SDSS Stripe 82
region in our previous works, in which the flux and spectral variability have
been studied. In this work, we construct the flux-flux diagram using SDSS u and
i multi-epoch data for these eighteen SSRQs. The standard accretion disk model
is used to fit the flux-flux variations, in order to explore the variability
mechanism. Results. The model fit to flux-flux diagram are tuned with fixed
black hole mass and varying accretion rate. We found that the flux-flux diagram
of all our SSRQs can be qualitatively described by the standard accretion disk
model with change of the accretion rate. Although non-thermal jet power-law
emission can also qualitatively reproduce the variability, the reasonable
accretion rates and black hole masses required to fit the flux-flux variations
suggest that a disk emission with variable accretion rate is a plausible
description of the data.
