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A crucial difficulty in understanding the nature of the putative accretiondisk in AGNs is that some of its key intrinsic spectral signatures cannot beobserved directly. The strong emissions from the broad-line region (BLR) andthe obscuring torus, which are generally yet to be spatially resolved,essentially 'bury' such signatures. Here we argue that we can actually isolatethe disk emission spectrum by using optical and near-infrared polarization ofquasars and uncover the important spectral signatures. In these quasars, thepolarization is considered to originate from electron scattering interior tothe BLR, so that the polarized flux shows the disk spectrum with all theemissions from the BLR and torus eliminated. The polarized flux observationshave now revealed a Balmer edge feature in absorption and a blue near-infraredspectral shape consistent with a specific and robust theoretical prediction.These results critically verify the long-standing picture of an optically thickand locally heated disk in AGNs.

AGN accretion disks as spatially resolved by polarimetry