Optical Monitoring of Gamma-Ray Loud Blazars

The observations by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) have shown that highly variable and radio-loud quasars emit a significant fraction of their energy in the γ band. According to the Inverse Compton model, the γ-ray emission is due to upscattering of soft (IR-optical-UV) photons by high energy particles. Optical monitoring is thus of great value in providing information on the mechanisms that rule the production of the seed photons for the γ-ray radiation and on the γ-ray emission itself. In particular, detection of variability correlations between optical and γ-ray emissions would be a crucial test for the theoretical predictions.