The spectrum of a single photoionized cloud

Abstract

The emission-line spectrum of a quasar is most likely emitted by an ensemble of photoionized clouds moving with a variety of velocities, with a range of densities and distances from the central object. The state of the art in this field is to first compute the emission from a single cloud, and then prescribe a mix of clouds to reproduce line intensities, profiles, and reverberation lags. Here I review the parameters that de-fine emission from a single cloud and the outstanding problems in qua-sar emission-line analysis.