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