The presence of extra dimensions generically modify the spacetime geometry of a rotating black hole, by adding an additional hair, besides the mass
M
and the angular momentum
J
, known as the ‘tidal ...charge’ parameter,
β
. In a braneworld scenario with one extra spatial dimension, the extra dimension is expected to manifest itself through – (a) negative values of
β
, and (b) modified gravitational perturbations. This in turn would affect the quasi-normal modes of rotating black holes. We numerically solve the perturbed gravitational field equations using the continued fractions method and determine the quasi-normal mode spectra for the braneworld black hole. We find that increasingly negative values of
β
correspond to a diminishing imaginary part of the quasi-normal mode, or equivalently, an increasing damping time. Using the publicly available data of the properties of the remnant black hole in the gravitational wave signal GW150914, we check for consistency between the predicted values (for a given
β
) of the frequency and damping time of the least-damped
ℓ
=
2
,
m
=
2
quasi-normal mode and measurements of these quantities using other independent techniques. We find that it is highly unlikely for the tidal charge,
β
≲
-
0.05
, providing a conservative limit on the tidal charge parameter. Implications and future directions are discussed.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Major interventions have been introduced worldwide to slow down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Large scale lockdown of human movements are effective in reducing the spread, but they come at a ...cost of significantly limited societal functions. We show that natural human movements are statistically diverse, and the spread of the disease is significantly influenced by a small group of active individuals and gathering venues. We find that interventions focused on these most mobile individuals and popular venues reduce both the peak infection rate and the total infected population while retaining high social activity levels. These trends are seen consistently in simulations with real human mobility data of different scales, resolutions, and modalities from multiple cities across the world. The observation implies that compared to broad sweeping interventions, more heterogeneous strategies that are targeted based on the network effects in human mobility provide a better balance between pandemic control and regular social activities.
Impairment of navigation is one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but to date studies have involved proxy tests of navigation rather than studies of real life behaviour. Here we ...use GPS tracking to measure ecological outdoor behaviour in AD. The aim was to use data-driven machine learning approaches to explore spatial metrics within real life navigational traces that discriminate AD patients from controls. 15 AD patients and 18 controls underwent tracking of their outdoor navigation over two weeks. Three kinds of spatiotemporal features of segments were extracted, characterising the mobility domain (entropy, segment similarity, distance from home), spatial shape (total turning angle, segment complexity), and temporal characteristics (stop duration). Patients significantly differed from controls on entropy (p-value 0.008), segment similarity (p-value Formula: see text), and distance from home (p-value Formula: see text). Graph-based analyses yielded preliminary data indicating that topological features assessing the connectivity of visited locations may also differentiate patients from controls. In conclusion, our results show that specific outdoor navigation features discriminate AD patients from controls, which has significant implication for future AD diagnostics, outcome measures and interventions. Furthermore, this work illustrates how wearables-based sensing of everyday behaviour may be used to deliver ecologically-valid digital biomarkers of AD pathophysiology.
Advanced LIGO's recent observations of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging binary black holes have opened up a unique laboratory to test general relativity (GR) in the highly relativistic regime. ...One of the tests used to establish the consistency of the first LIGO event with a binary black hole merger predicted by GR was the inspiral-merger-ringdown consistency test. This involves inferring the mass and spin of the remnant black hole from the inspiral (low-frequency) part of the observed signal and checking for the consistency of the inferred parameters with the same estimated from the post-inspiral (high-frequency) part of the signal. Based on the observed rate of binary black hole mergers, we expect the advanced GW observatories to observe hundreds of binary black hole mergers every year when operating at their design sensitivities, most of them with modest signal to noise ratios (SNRs). Anticipating such observations, this paper shows how constraints from a large number of events with modest SNRs can be combined to produce strong constraints on deviations from GR. Using kludge modified GR waveforms, we demonstrate how this test could identify certain types of deviations from GR if such deviations are present in the signal waveforms. We also study the robustness of this test against reasonable variations of a variety of different analysis parameters.
Advances in wearable sensing and mobile computing have enabled the collection of health and well-being data outside of traditional laboratory and hospital settings, paving the way for a new era of ...mobile health. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in various domains, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize healthcare. Devices can now diagnose diseases, predict heart irregularities and unlock the full potential of human cognition. However, the application of machine learning (ML) to mobile health sensing poses unique challenges due to noisy sensor measurements, high-dimensional data, sparse and irregular time series, heterogeneity in data, privacy concerns and resource constraints. Despite the recognition of the value of mobile sensing, leveraging these datasets has lagged behind other areas of ML. Furthermore, obtaining quality annotations and ground truth for such data is often expensive or impractical. While recent large-scale longitudinal studies have shown promise in leveraging wearable sensor data for health monitoring and prediction, they also introduce new challenges for data modelling. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of human-centred AI for mobile health, focusing on key sensing modalities such as audio, location and activity tracking. We discuss the limitations of current approaches and propose potential solutions.
The no-hair conjecture in general relativity (GR) states that the properties of an astrophysical Kerr black hole (BH) are completely described by its mass and spin. As a consequence, the complex ...quasinormal-mode (QNM) frequencies of a binary–black-hole (BBH) ringdown can be uniquely determined by the mass and spin of the remnant object. Conversely, measurement of the QNM frequencies could be an independent test of the no-hair conjecture. This paper extends to spinning BHs earlier work that proposed to test the no-hair conjecture by measuring the complex QNM frequencies of a BBH ringdown using parameterized inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms in the effective-one-body formalism, thereby taking full advantage of the entire signal power and removing dependency on the predicted or estimated start time of the ringdown. Our method was used to analyze the properties of the merger remnants for BBHs observed by LIGO-Virgo in the first half of their third observing (O3a) run. After testing our method with GR and non-GR synthetic-signal injections in Gaussian noise, we analyze, for the first time, two BBHs from the first (O1) and second (O2) LIGO-Virgo observing runs and two additional BBHs from the O3a run. We then provide joint constraints with published results from the O3a run. In the most agnostic and conservative scenario, where we combine the information from different events using a hierarchical approach, we obtain, at 90% credibility, that the fractional deviations in the frequency (damping time) of the dominant QNM are δf220=0.03−0.09+0.10 (δτ220=0.10−0.39+0.44), respectively, an improvement of a factor of ∼4 (∼2) over the results obtained with our model in the LIGO-Virgo publication. The single-event most-stringent constraint to date continues to be GW150914, for which we obtain δf220=0.05−0.07+0.11 and δτ220=0.07−0.23+0.26.