PSD analysis of optical QSO light curves

One of the elementary properties of quasar activity is continuous variability in the UV/optical bands. The power spectral density (PSD) potentially contains information about the underlying processes connected to variability. We applied a novel method based on continuous-time autoregressive moving average (CARMA) models (Kelly et al. 2014) to derive the PSD even for irregularly sampled light curves. Using a sample of ~100 X-ray selected non-local QSOs from the XMM-COSMOS catalog and optical light curves provided by the Pan-STARRS1 MDF survey we find that the PSD resembles a broken power-law with a high-frequency slope significantly steeper than observed in X-ray studies. The PSD normalization is observed to scale inversely with bolometric luminosity and Eddington ratio, whereas there is no correlation between the characteristic bend timescale and black hole mass. We find a weak tendency for QSOs with higher black hole mass to have steeper high-frequency PSD slopes. In an ongoing work we extend these studies employing a sample of ~700 variable broad-line QSOs with high-quality black hole mass estimates and well-sampled light curves from the SDSS-RM project.