Hourly Spectral Variability of Mrk 421

Abstract

Mrk 421 is the first TeV blazar found to exhibit significant spectral variability during strong flaring activity, showing hardening of the TeV spectrum in high emission states. Mrk 421 is also known to exhibit flux variability on time scales as short as 15 minutes. In this paper we present studies of hourly spectral variability of Mrk 421 in 2001 using data from the Whipple Observatory 10m gamma-ray telescope.

4 pages, to be published in the Proceedings of the 28th International Cosmic Ray Conference (Tsukuba, Japan 2003)