Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Ampl2Einstein (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : European Organization for Nuclear Research — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CERN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 75000.0 €

Four years ago, the LIGO/Virgo observation of a black-hole binary merger heralded the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy. The promise of future observations calls for an invigorated effort to underpin the theoretical framework and supply the predictions needed for detecting future signals and exploiting them for astronomical and astrophysical studies. Ampl2Einstein will take ideas and techniques from recent years' dramatic advances in Quantum Scattering Amplitudes, creating new tools for taking their classical limits and using it for gravitational physics. The powerful `square root' relation between gravity and a generalization of electrodynamics known as Yang--Mills theory will play a key role in making this route simpler than direct classical calculation. We will transfer these ideas to classical General Relativity to compute new perturbative orders, spin-dependent observables, and the dependence on the internal structure of merging objects. We will exploit symmetries and structure we find in order to extrapolate to even higher orders in the gravitational theory. We will make such calculations vastly simpler, pushing the known frontier much further in perturbation theory and in complexity of observables. These advances will give rise to a new generation of gravitational-wave templates, dramatically extending the observing power of detectors. They will allow observers to see weaker signals and will be key to resolving long-standing puzzles about the internal structure of neutron stars. We will apply novel technologies developed for scattering amplitudes to bound-state calculations in both quantum and classical theory. Our research will also lead to a deeper understanding of the classical limit of quantum field theory, relevant to gravitational-wave observations and beyond. The transfer of ideas to the new domain of General Relativity will dramatically enhance our ability to reveal new physics encoded in the subtlest of gravitational-wave signals.

Mots-clés : gravitational waves,scattering amplitudes,gravitational scattering
Projet ERC : FRONTHAL (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Hungarian Academy of Sciences — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MTA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1597575.0 €

Frontal cortical areas are responsible for a wide range of executive and cognitive functions. Frontal cortices communicate with the thalamus via bidirectional pathways and these connections are indispensable for frontal cortical operations. Still, we have very little information about the specificity of connections, synaptic interactions and plasticity between frontal cortex and thalamus and the roles of these interactions in frontal cortical functions. In the present proposal, we will test the hypothesis that frontal cortical areas developed a highly specialized connectivity pattern with the thalamus. This supports unique interactions between the cortex and the thalamus according to the specific requirements of frontal cortical activity, including experience-dependent plastic changes. The project will use cell type-specific viral tracing in mice and 3D electron microscopic reconstructions in mice and humans to identify circuit motifs that are evolutionarily conserved, yet, still specific to fronto-thalamic pathways. The physiological approach will employ in vivo optogenetics combined with intra-, juxta- and extracellular recordings. We will perform behavioral experiments by bidirectional modulation of well-defined elements in the network, in learning paradigms, which depend on the integrity of frontal cortex. The project is the first systematic approach which aims to understand the nature of interaction between the frontal cortex and the thalamus. It will not only fill the tremendous gap in our knowledge regarding these pathways but will help us elucidate the functional organization of non-sensory thalamus in general. Frontal cortices are involved in a wide range of major neurological disorders (e.g. Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia, chronic pain) which affect executive functions and involve fronto-thalamic pathways. We believe that understanding fronto-thalamic interactions will lead to fundamentally novel insight into the nature of these diseases.

Mots-clés : thalamocortical,plasticity,inhibition,spine,oscillations,electron micrsoscopy,optogenetics
Projet ERC : DAFNE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Friedrich Schiller University Jena — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FSU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1453937.0 €

Fully nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE) arise in many applications ranging from physics to economy. They are different from PDEs in mechanics, and the PDE theory relies on the generalized solution concept of so-called viscosity solutions. Monotone finite difference methods (FDM) are provably convergent for approximating viscosity solutions, but are restricted to regular meshes and low-order approximations, thus having limitations in resolving realistic geometries or dealing with local mesh refinement. As viscosity solutions are lacking smoothness properties in general, adaptive approximations are desirable. In contrast to FDM, finite element methods (FEM) offer the possibility of high-order approximations with flexibility in adaptive and automatic mesh design. However, provably convergent FEM formulations for viscosity solutions to nonvariational problems are as yet unknown. With a background in the numerical analysis of PDEs, especially the theory of FEM and adaptive algorithms, DAFNE aims at laying the theoretical and practical foundation for the application of FEM and automatic mesh-refinement algorithms to fully nonlinear equations. The focus is on the large class of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations. They originated from stochastic control problems, but more generally comprise many classical and relevant equations like Pucci's equation or the Monge-Ampère equation with applications in finance, optimal transport, physics, and geometry. The novel approach is to estimate local regularity properties through the control variable in the HJB formulation. This (a) gives rise to new regularization strategies and (b) indicates where the mesh needs to be refined. Both achievements are key to the design of a new FEM formulation. The project is at the frontiers of PDE analysis, numerical analysis, and scientific computing. The long-term goal is to establish the first convergence proofs for adaptive FEM simulations of fully nonlinear phenomena.
Projet ERC : Design2Flow (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University Hospital Würzburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Functional 3D tissue models could replace animal experiments and significantly reduce the cost of over 100 million € that pharmaceutical companies spend on failed drug development every year. The main bottleneck in the in vitro creation of 3D tissues is the need for perfusable vascularization in tissues bigger than 1 mm. So far, no generally applicable product exists for that purpose. This hampers advances in drug development as well as in research. Design2Flow will develop products, which overcome this limitation and enable the individualized on-demand creation of perfusable and therefore larger and more complex tissues. This will fundamentally reform research in life sciences by offering easy-to-use, customizable, perfusable 3D cell culture products of interest to the pharmaceutical industry and research labs. To achieve this goal melt electrowriting will be utilized to fabricate sacrificial scaffolds, which resemble the native microvasculature. The fabricated scaffolds will be combined with insert clips as easy-to-use designs for multiwell plates, which will allow a passive perfusion of the construct to keep the tissue alive without the need for a special pump – a beginner friendly way to start advanced 3D cell culture with basic laboratory equipment, without the need for expensive devices or experienced personal. For customers working with perfusion pumps, the proposed solution will be adapted to perfusion chambers for an active and controllable perfusion of the tissue by flow reactors, mimicking the in vivo blood flow even more accurately. This will provide an advanced and customizable way to create tissues as accurate as possible for physiological cultivation in bioreactors.

Mots-clés : tissue engineering,microchannel creation,perfusion chamber,well plate insert,vascularization,3d cell culture
Projet ERC : COCONIS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Freiburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2295000.0 €

Fundamental quantum mechanical processes determine the properties of matter and their functionality. In order to understand complex processes such as light harvesting in photosynthesis and photovoltaics, a detailed knowledge of coherent effects in excitation and charge transfer processes and related dynamics is required. To a large extent, the complexity of the systems induces too many interactions and perturbations of the processes to isolate and understand individual mechanisms. Advanced experimental methods, capable of detecting quantum coherences, so far are not applicable to quantum state controlled molecular complexes isolated from the perturbing environment, due to the low density of such targets. In this project we will for the first time employ coherent femtosecond multidimensional spectroscopy to dilute isolated molecular complexes. For a specific heterogeneous synthesis we will use aggregation in superfluid helium at millikelvin temperatures. In order to reach the needed sensitivity we will setup a novel phase modulation technique including lock-in demodulation in combination with mass-resolved ionization and photoelectron detection. Advanced mathematical methods will furthermore be developed and applied, boosting efficient collection of multidimensional datasets. We will be able to (a) identify processes and coherent dynamics of excitation and charge transfer in fundamental heterogeneous complexes, in particular van der Waals bound donor acceptor complexes (b) elucidate coherence and dissipation effects in contact with tailored external baths, (c) investigate microsolvation, i.e. measure the evolution of dynamic properties as a function of attached solvent molecules, (d) determine collective effects like autoionization in dilute atomic gases or exciton annihilation in semiconductor systems, (e) implement compressed sensing in multidimensional data acquisition, (f) implement largely parallelized phase-cycling into real-time data acquisition.
Projet ERC : CHEMREACTIONSCAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Karlsruhe Institute of Technology — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KIT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149875.0 €

Funded by the ERC-Starting Grant COMBIPATTERNING, we have developed a novel nanolayer-based synthesis based on patterning different materials with laser radiation in form of a pan-cake spots in array format. Our synthesis robot can do it for many different materials, for >40.000 spots per glass slide, in exactly defined stoichiometries, and for <200 € costs. The robot uses short laser pulses to transfer <1ng “punched-out” material per spot from a donor foil to a synthesis slide. Then, the reactants embedded in the nano thin polymer pan-cake spots can mix with each other and thus undergo chemical reactions by heating the synthesis slide. Due to the large progress in MALDI imaging and the fluorescent scanners, the results of the reactions can be analyzed in the same array format. The masses found by MALDI imaging in some spots might help us to identify unknown chemical reactions. We believe that the nanolayer-based synthesis developed by us might be a basis for future chemistry stations linking scientists and accelerating their studies to screen for novel chemical reactions in a high throughput manner. Instead of studying the interaction between reactants in a single test glass, the chemists will just spin-coat their educts on microscope slides and supply them together with a file for desired reactant combinations to the server - chemical reaction scanner. Therefore, we want to verify the innovation potential of the nanolayer-based synthesis that should find a market where a novel synthesis strategy on combining novel building blocks should be developed, especially, in the field of novel bioactive chemicals and fluorophores.

Mots-clés : synthesis from nanolayers,array format,small compounds
Projet ERC : E-DUALITY (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2492500.0 €

Future data-driven modelling is increasingly challenging for many systems due to higher complexity levels, such as in energy systems, environmental and climate modelling, traffic and transport, industrial processes, health, safety, and others. This requires powerful concepts and frameworks that enable the design of high quality predictive models. In this proposal E-DUALITY we will explore and engineer the potential of duality principles for future data-driven modelling. An existing example illustrating the important role of duality in this context is support vector machines, which possess primal and dual model representations, in terms of feature maps and kernels, respectively. Within this project, besides using existing notions of duality that are relevant for data-driven modelling (e.g. Lagrange duality, Legendre-Fenchel duality, Monge-Kantorovich duality), we will also explore new ones. Duality principles will be employed for obtaining a generically applicable framework with unifying insights, handling different system complexity levels, optimal model representations and designing efficient algorithms. This will require taking an integrative approach across different research fields. The new framework should be able to include e.g. multi-view and multiple function learning, multiplex and multilayer networks, tensor models, multi-scale and deep architectures as particular instances and to combine several of such characteristics, in addition to simple basic schemes. It will include both parametric and kernel-based approaches for tasks as regression, classification, clustering, dimensionality reduction, outlier detection and dynamical systems modelling. Higher risk elements are the search for new standard forms in modelling systems with different complexity levels, matching models and representations to system characteristics, and developing algorithms for large scale applications within this powerful new framework.

Mots-clés : data driven modelling
Projet ERC : GENEVOSYN (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

GENEVOSYN has three highly ambitious objectives that will enable the engineering of new generations of crop plants. The project consists of three complementary workpackages (WPs) and will use both synthetic genomes and naturally available genomes as raw material for novel biotechnology and synthetic biology approaches. It will employ experimental gene and genome transfer as well as recently discovered natural (horizontal) genome transfer processes to generate new crop varieties and species. In WP1, the plastid (chloroplast) will be developed as a highly efficient platform for synthetic biology applications in plants. This will be accomplished by pursuing bottom-up and top-down synthetic biology approaches. They include the construction of large synthetic multigene operons towards introducing new complex metabolic pathways into plants, and the design, synthesis, assembly and booting up of radically redesigned synthetic genomes that ultimately will allow us to expand the genetic code and thereby the amino acid repertoire of plant cells. In WP2, GENEVOSYN aims at developing a technology for mitochondrial genome engineering in plants. The possibility to alter the genetic information in plant mitochondria by transformation would revolutionize both basic and applied research on plant mitochondria, and pave the way to harnessing the enormous potential of mitochondrial biotechnology. Finally, WP3 will exploit recently discovered horizontal genome transfer processes for the creation of novel crop species and the improvement of existing ones. To this end, we will use grafting-assisted horizontal genome transfer between crop species in the nightshade family (Solanaceae) to (i) generate new combinations of nuclear and plastid genomes and determine the impact of the plastid genome and specific plastid genes on plant growth and stress tolerance, and (ii) produce novel (synthetic) species that arise from the combination of entire nuclear genomes of existing species.

Mots-clés : plant genetic engineering,metabolic engineering,synthetic genomics,mitochondrion,chloroplast,speciation,experimental evolution,transgenic plant
Projet ERC : CONICALM (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Stockholm University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1480750.0 €

Gaining detailed control over chemical reactions has always been a chemists dream. Quantum coherent control has been pursuing this dream by using specially tailored light fields to control chemical reactions on an atomistic level. With the advancement of cavity quantum electrodynamics and its recent application to molecules, using the quantum properties of light to control photo-chemistry has come into reach. Recent, ground breaking experiments have show that one can utilize the vacuum field of an optical nano-resonator to significantly modify the potential energy landscape and thus its photo-chemistry. The underlying effect is the formation of so called "dressed states", which are created when the quantized radiation field mode couples to a molecular electronic transition. In the resulting coupled light-matter system the molecular and the photonic degrees of freedom are heavily mixed. While this effect is well understood for atomic samples, it is not yet fully understood for molecules. The introduction of the nuclear degrees of freedom requires new theoretical frameworks. This effect can be used to modify reaction pathways of chemical and photo-chemical reactions. This opens a wide range of possibilities to engineer novel types of light driven catalysts. The major objectives of this proposal are to advance the theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms, to build a suitable tool chest for numerical simulations, to use the insight and tools to propose new photo-chemical applications, and to close the gap between theory and experiment. We will theoretically investigate possibilities to optimize organic solar cells, and the photo catalytic schemes for environmentally relevant molecules.

Mots-clés : quantum dynamics,cavity quantum electrodynamics,light matter interactions,quantum light,time resolved spectroscopy
Projet ERC : FEEDGALAXIES (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Milano-Bicocca — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIMIB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 907032.19 €

Galaxies reside within a web of gas that feeds the formation of new stars. Following star formation, galaxies eject some of their gas reservoir back into this cosmic web. This proposal addresses the fundamental questions of how these inflows and outflows regulate the evolution of galaxies. My research team will tackle two key problems: 1) how gas accretion regulates the build-up of galaxies; 2) how efficiently outflows are in removing gas from star-forming regions. To characterise these flows across five billion years of cosmic history, we will pursue cutting-edge research on the halo gas, which is the material around the central galaxies, within dark matter halos. We will focus on scales ranging from a few kiloparsecs, where outflows originate, up to hundreds of kiloparsecs from galaxies, where inflows and outflows have visible impacts on halos. We will attack this problem using both simulations and observations with the largest telescopes on the ground and in space. With novel applications of absorption spectroscopy, we will gain a new vantage point on the astrophysics of these gas flows. Exploiting unprecedented datasets that I am currently assembling thanks to ground-breaking developments in instrumentation, we will directly connect the properties of halo gas to those of the central galaxies, investigating the impact that the baryonic processes probed in absorption have on galaxies seen in emission. In parallel, using new hydrodynamic simulations and radiative transfer calculations, we will go beyond present state-of-the-art methodologies to unveil the theory behind the origin of these gas flows, a crucial aspect to decode the physics probed by our observations. As a result of this powerful synergy between observations and simulations, this programme will provide the most advanced analysis of the impact that inflows and outflows have on galaxy evolution, shaping the direction of future work at 40m telescopes and the next generation of cosmological simulations.

Mots-clés : halo gas,inflows,outflows,absorption line systems