GLAST and lorentz violation

We study possible Lorentz violations by means of gamma ray bursts with special focus on the large array telescope of GLAST ( gamma ray large area space telescope), where we concentrate on models with linear corrections to the speed of light. We simulate bursts with gtobssim and introduce a Lorentz violating term in the arrival times of the photons. We further perturb these arrival times and energies with a Gaussian distribution corresponding to the time and energy resolution of GLAST. We then vary the photon flux in gtobssim in order to derive a relation between the photon number and the standard deviation of the Lorentz violating term. We conclude with the fact that our maximum likelihood method as first developed in Lamon et al ( 2008 Gen. Rel. Grav. 40 1731 [0706.4039] [gr-qc]) is able to make a statement on whether Nature breaks the Lorentz symmetry if the number of bursts with known redshifts is of the order of 100. However, the systematic errors caused by unknown mechanisms for photon emission are not considered here, despite the fact that these errors should be the main obstacle to detecting Lorentz violations.