Hi, 

Work

Main Research Areas: Polarimetric study of kpc-scale radio outflows of Blazars, Fanaroff-Riley dichotomy and Blazar Divide in Radio-loud AGN

Supervisor: Kshitij Thorat

Research description:

    My Ph.D. thesis, titled "Examining the Fanaroff-Riley and Blazar Divide using the Palomar Green Sample" was completed in May 2025 under the supervision of Dr. Preeti Kharb. 

My Ph.D. thesis work aimed to investigate the physical drivers behind the two different kinds of radio outflows found in radio-loud (RL) active galactic nuclei (AGN) that form the basis of the Fanaroff-Riley (FR) dichotomy and the Blazar Divide. We examined low radio frequency uGMRT and VLA polarization data of blazars belonging to the Palomar Green (PG) survey to look for differences in the kpc-scale magnetic field structures between RL quasars and BL Lac objects.  The aim was to understand the reasons and mechanisms behind the differences in jets in the FR subclasses and if it is primarily due to intrinsic properties related to the black hole-accretion disk systems and jet launching or due to extrinsic properties like the density of kpc-scale environments, which influence the jet-medium interaction. It also aimed to test the orientation-based RL AGN unification between FR-IIs and quasars and FR-Is and BL Lac objects. 

As a postdoctoral fellow, I am continuing to work on exploring radio-loud AGN jet phenomenon with MeerKAT and VLBI, specifically radio polarimetric and VLBI observations of AGN with a focus on disturbed radio morphology sources and jet dynamics in blazars.

Selected publications:

1. Investigating Differences in the Palomar-Green Blazar Population Using Polarization

2. A Kpc-scale radio polarization study of PG BL Lacs with the uGMRT

3. A Polarimetric Study of 9 PG Quasars with the VLA

4. A Polarization Study of 3 Blazars using the uGMRT at ~600 MHz

All publications:

Astronomy Data Service

Arxiv Preprint Server

ORCID : https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0367-812X

Improved CASA-based polarization pipeline for uGMRT:

 Improved CASA-based polarization pipeline for uGMRT:

https://github.com/jbaghel/Improved-uGMRT-polarization-pipeline

This pipeline has so far been tested extensively on Band 4 uGMRT data. 

Please cite the following paper if you use this pipeline for publication purposes

Citation Link

Other pipelines:

https://sites.google.com/view/ugmrtdatapipelines/home

Education:

B.Sc. (Physics Honours) 

[Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India]

Integrated Ph.D.

[National Centre for Radio Astrophysics - Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune, India]

Postdoctoral Fellow (IDIA)

[University of Pretoria, South Africa]

Contact : 

   Email: janhavi.baghel@tuks.co.za  

Phone: +27-613053865

Office: Room 5-70, Natural Sciences Building 1- Floor 5,

Main Campus - University of Pretoria,

Cnr Lynnwood and University Roads,

Hatfield, Pretoria, 

SOUTH AFRICA

0083