Exploring AGN Structure with Reflection and Reprocessing in Swift/BAT AGN

One of the open questions regarding the structure of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is the diversity and distribution of the covering fraction of their obscuring torus. This problem has typically been approached either using clumpy torus modeling of IR observations or using X-ray obscuration column depth distributions as a proxy. We investigated this question using the sample of 69 Swift/BAT AGN with hard X-ray spectra from NuSTAR and IR spectral energy distribution from Herschel and WISE. We find a correlation between hard X-ray reflection and the IR emission, suggesting both of these emissions are due to processing of the intrinsic emission from the corona and accretion disk by the same structure, often called the torus. As the amount of reprocessing is likely to be related to the fraction of the sky covered by the torus, we modeled the X-ray reflection and IR emission expected for a range of covering fraction distributions to find those yielding observables consistent with our data. We find that broad distributions centered around a covering factor of at least 40% match our observations best. I will discuss this new methodology for exploring the covering fraction distribution of Swift-BAT AGN and its implications for the torus structure.