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{Abridged} Rapid variations in optical flux are seen in many quasars and all blazars. The amount of variability in different classes of Active Galactic Nuclei has been studied extensively but many questions remain unanswered. We present the results of a long-term programme to investigate the intra-night optical variability (INOV) of powerful flat spectrum radio core-dominated quasars (CDQs), with a focus on probing the relationship of INOV to the degree of optical polarization. We observed a sample of 16 bright CDQs showing strong broad optical emission lines and consisting of both high and low optical polarization quasars (HPCDQs and LPCDQs). We employed ARIES, IIA, IGO telescopes, to carry out {it R}-band monitoring on a total of 47 nights. Combining these INOV data with those taken from the literature, we were able to increase the sample size to 21 CDQs(12 LPCDQs and 9 HPCDQs) monitored on a total of 73 nights. As the existence of a prominent flat-spectrum radio core signifies that strong relativistic beaming is present in all these CDQs, the definitions of the two sets differ primarily in fractional optical polarization, the LPCDQs showing a very low median$ P_{op} simeq$ 0.4 per cent. Our study yields an INOV duty cycle (DC) of $sim$28 per cent for the LPCDQs and $sim 68$ percent for HPCDQs. If only strong INOV with fractional amplitude above 3 per cent is considered, the corresponding DCs are $sim$ 7 per cent and $sim$ 40 per cent, respectively.From this strong contrast between the two classes of luminous, relativistically beamed quasars, it is apparent that relativistic beaming is normally not a sufficient condition for strong INOV and a high optical polarization is the other necessary condition.
Although well established for BL Lac objects and radio-loud quasars, the occurrence of intra-night optical variability (INOV) in radio-quiet quasars is still debated, primarily since only a handful of INOV events with good statistical significance, a
The incidence of intra-night optical variability (INOV) is known to to differ significantly among different classes of powerful active galactic nuclei (AGN). A number of statistical methods have been employed in the literature for testing the presenc
We present the results of extensive multi-band intra-night optical monitoring of BL Lacertae during 2010--2012. BL Lacertae was very active in this period and showed intense variability in almost all wavelengths. We extensively observed it for a tota
We monitored BL Lacertae frequently during 2014 - 2016 when it was generally in a high state. We searched for intra-day variability for 43 nights using quasi-simultaneous measurements in the B, V, R, and I bands (totaling 143 light curves); the typic
We present the results of an optical photometric monitoring program of 10 extremely radio loud broad absorption line quasars (RL-BALQSOs) with radio-loudness parameter, R, greater than 100 and magnitude g_i < 19. Over an observing run of about 3.5-6.