Spectral and Time Series Analyses of the Seyfert 1 AGN: Zw 229.015
  We analyse the spectra of the archival XMM-Newton data of the Seyfert 1 AGN
Zw 229.015 in the energy range $0.3 - 10.0$ keV. When fitted with a simple
power-law, the spectrum shows signatures of weak soft excess below 1.0 keV. We
find that both thermal comptonisation and relativistically blurred reflection
models provide the most acceptable spectral fits with plausible physical
explanations to the origin of the soft excess than do multicolour disc
blackbody and smeared wind absorption models. This motivated us to study the
variability properties of the soft and the hard X-ray emissions from the source
and the relationship between them to put further constraints on the above
models. Our analysis reveals that the variation in the $3.0 - 10.0$ keV band
lags that in the $0.3 - 1.0$ keV by $600^{+290}_{-280}$ s, while the lag
between the $1.0 - 10.0$ keV and $0.3 - 1.0$ keV is $980^{+500}_{-500}$ s. This
implies that the X-ray emissions are possibly emanating from different regions
within the system. From these values, we estimate the X-ray emission region to
be within $20R_g$ of the central supermassive black hole (where $R_g=GM/c^2$,
$M$ is the mass of black hole, $G$ the Newton gravitational constant and $c$
the speed of light). Furthermore, we use XMM-Newton and Kepler photometric
lightcurves of the source to search for possible nonlinear signature in the
flux variability. We find evidence that the variability in the system may be
dominated by stochasticity rather than deterministic chaos which has
implications for the dynamics of the accretion system.
