It is known that some active galactic nuclei (AGNs) transited from type 1 to type 2 or vice versa. There are two explanations for the so-called changing look AGNs: one is the dramatic change of the obscuration along the line-of-sight, the other is the variation of accretion rate. In this paper, we report the detection of large amplitude variations in the mid-infrared luminosity during the transitions in 10 changing look AGNs using WISE and newly released NEOWISE-R data. The mid-infrared light curves of 10 objects echoes the variability in the optical band with a time lag expected for dust reprocessing. The large variability amplitude is inconsistent with the scenario of varying obscuration, rather supports the scheme of dramatic change in the accretion rate.
@article{arxiv.1707.02686,
title = {Mid-infrared variability of changing-look AGN},
author = {Zhenfeng Sheng and Tinggui Wang and Ning Jiang and Chenwei Yang and Lin Yan and Liming Dou and Bo Peng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.02686},
year = {2017}
}