Modeling IR SED of AGN with Spitzer and Herschel data
  One of the remaining open issues in the context of the analysis of Active
Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is the evidence that nuclear gravitational accretion is
often accompanied by a concurrent starburst (SB) activity. What is, in this
picture, the role played by the obscuring dust around the nucleus and what do
the state of the art AGN torus models have to say? Can the IR data provided by
Spitzer and Herschel help us in extensively investigate both phenomena and, if
so, how and with what limitations? In this paper we present our contribution to
the efforts of answering these questions. We show some of the main results
coming from a comparative study of various AGN SED modeling approaches,
focusing mostly on the much-debated issue about the morphology of the dust
distribution in the toroidal structure surrounding the AGN. We found that the
properties of dust in AGN as measured by matching observations (be it broad
band IR photometry or IR spectra) with models, strongly depend on the choiceof
the dust distribution. Then, we present the spectral energy distribution (SED)
fitting procedure we developed, making make the best use of Spitzer and
Herschel SPIRE mid- and far-IR observations, to dig into the role played by the
possible presence of an AGN on the host galaxy's properties.
