An analysis of whether optical/UV reverberation mapping can resolve the vertical structure of the X-ray corona illuminating an active-galactic-nucleus accretion disk. Modeling the corona as two lamps at different heights instead of a single on-axis point (the lamppost model), it shows that the wavelength-dependent time-delay curve and the cross-correlation of the light curves are nearly the same as for one lamp at the luminosity-weighted mean height, so the technique is largely insensitive to vertical corona extension.
Tests whether optical/UV reverberation mapping of an active galactic nucleus's accretion disk can detect the vertical extent of its X-ray corona. Reverberation mapping infers the disk's size from the…