Lorentz Symmetry in Superluminal AGN Jets

Since summer 2025, I have worked with Professor Seifert at Connecticut College to investigate superluminal jets from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in order to find potential violations of Lorentz symmetry. The project is primarily concerned with developing a Hamiltonian Markov-chain Monte Carlo (HMCMC) algorithm utilizing PyMC and PyTensor to analyze data from the MOJAVE program.

Current progress:

• Developed an isotropic version of the MCMC model, then expanded from that to an anisotropic version.
• Utilized synthetic datasets to verify the accuracy of the model and to identify possible degeneracies in our likelihood functions, frequently using Mathematica to evaluate these distributions.
• Analyzing data from the MOJAVE program to draw conclusions; identified a selection effect stemming from relativistic beaming.

Code for the project is available on GitHub. I presented this work at SSRI 2025, and the poster is available on this site.