Abstract: GW190521 is the compact binary with the largest masses observed to date, with at least one black hole in the pair-instability gap. This event has also been claimed to be associated with an optical flare observed by the Zwicky Transient Facility in an active galactic nucleus (AGN), possibly due to the postmerger motion of the merger remnant in the AGN gaseous disk. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) may detect up to ten such gas-rich black-hole binaries months to years before their detection by Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory or Virgo-like interferometers, localizing them in the sky within approximate to 1 degrees(2). LISA will also measure directly deviations from purely vacuum and stationary waveforms arising from gas accretion, dynamical friction, and orbital motion around the AGN's massive black hole (acceleration, strong lensing, and Doppler modulation). LISA will therefore be crucial to enable us to point electromagnetic telescopes ahead of time toward this novel class of gas-rich sources, to gain direct insight on their physics, and to disentangle environmental effects from corrections to general relativity that may also appear in the waveforms at low frequencies.

Abstract: Patient Trajectories (PTs) are a method of representing the temporal evolution of patients. They can include information from different sources and be used in socio-medical or clinical domains. PTs have generally been used to generate and study the most common trajectories in, for instance, the development of a disease. On the other hand, healthcare predictive models generally rely on static snapshots of patient information. Only a few works about prediction in healthcare have been found that use PTs, and therefore benefit from their temporal dimension. All of them, however, have used PTs created from single-source information. Therefore, the use of longitudinal multi-scale data to build PTs and use them to obtain predictions about health conditions is yet to be explored. Our hypothesis is that local similarities on small chunks of PTs can identify similar patients concerning their future morbidities. The objectives of this work are (1) to develop a methodology to identify local similarities between PTs before the occurrence of morbidities to predict these on new query individuals; and (2) to validate this methodology on risk prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) occurrence in patients with diabetes. We have proposed a novel formal definition of PTs based on sequences of longitudinal multi-scale data. Moreover, a dynamic programming methodology to identify local alignments on PTs for predicting future morbidities is proposed. Both the proposed methodology for PT definition and the alignment algorithm are generic to be applied on any clinical domain. We validated this solution for predicting CVD in patients with diabetes and we achieved a precision of 0.33, a recall of 0.72 and a specificity of 0.38. Therefore, the proposed solution in the diabetes use case can result of utmost utility to secondary screening.

Abstract: The decoupling of heavy fields as required by the Appelquist-Carazzone theorem plays a fundamental role in the construction of any effective field theory. However, it is not a trivial task to implement a renormalization prescription that produces the expected decoupling of massive fields, and it is even more difficult in curved spacetime. Focused on this idea, we consider the renormalization of the one-loop effective action for the Yukawa interaction with a background scalar field in curved space. We compute the beta functions within a generalized DeWitt-Schwinger subtraction procedure and discuss the decoupling in the running of the coupling constants. For the case of a quantized scalar field, all the beta function exhibit decoupling, including also the gravitational ones. For a quantized Dirac field, decoupling appears almost for all the beta functions. We obtain the anomalous result that the mass of the background scalar field does not decouple.