Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DM-Dawn (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : BMWE
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 399668.75 €

What is the nature of dark matter (DM)? This central question in physics could be soon addressed thanks to the unprecedented sensitivity of nuclear clocks. These Th-229-base clocks are set to overcome the inherent limitations of atomic and molecular clocks, which are less sensitive to the nuclear parameters, which dominate almost all motivated models of ultralight DM (ULDM) . Laser excitation of Th-229 has just reached 1:10^11 sensitivity. Given that a precision of 1:10^8 suffices to probe DM-models with world record reach (even before nuclear clocks are actually constructed), it implies that the era of nuclear clock supremacy has begun! We propose three thrusts that harness this revolutionary advancement to search for ULDM. The first is driven by our joint theory-experiment demonstration that the line shape analysis of the Th-229 isomeric state excitation may potentially lead to 1:10^21 effective sensitivity to ULDM, due to the direct-enhanced dependence on the strong interaction parameters. The second is theoretical and experimental exploration of the enhancement factor of O(10^5), that is currently uncertain, and cannot be robustly established. The third focus on studying the formal implications of the era of nuclear-clock supremacy. We provide projection for the reach of nuclear clocks for axion and scalar ULDM. We also demonstrate that a nuclear clock can be used as a QCDometer sensing spatially-dependent couplings, due to artificial source, or from super-Planckian-based physics via couplings to moduli-remnants. We further introduce a new class of non-axion ULDM models, that address the strong CP problem, where the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa elements vary in time, in addition to the nuclear parameters. It could be tested, thus, at accelerators as well as clocks, which leads to a novel synergy between different frontiers of physics. The proposal transforms future technologies into a concrete search for DM and beyond, ushering us into the era of nuclear clocks.

Mots-clés : nuclear clock,ultralight dm
Projet ERC : Supersolids (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université du Pays basque — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 81250.0 €

Supersolids are a paradoxical quantum phase of matter that combines the properties of superfluids and crystals, searched for long time in quantum solids and many other systems. Recently, we discovered a novel cluster phase in a quantum gas of magnetic atoms which realizes a supersolid. However, the limited size, the inhomogeneity, and the lack of appropriate detection methods have allowed so far to assess only very basic properties of supersolids. Here I propose an innovative density-phase microscope and original ideas that combine the best of matter-wave and condensed-matter methods to unveil the extraordinary properties of supersolids. With a two-layer superfluid-supersolid configuration we will measure both density and phase of the supersolid. With controllable optical potentials we will realize large, homogeneous crystal geometries in 1D and 2D. With high-resolution optical addressing we will manipulate locally the wavefunction, e. g. creating phase patterns or force fields, and we will follow the local dynamics. Our main goal is to explore fundamental properties that are largely unknown even theoretically: variable superfluid density under rotation; variable angular momentum of quantized vortices; dissipation-less deformation of the crystal; Josephson effect without barriers; quantum entanglement properties. We will also attempt the realization of new types of supersolid, to prove the generality of the phenomena: with coupled supersolid layers, we will move towards supersolidity in 3D; using a quasi-2D environment, we will attempt to realize two proposed types of strongly interacting and strongly correlated supersolids. Our work will establish connections between supersolids and other patterned quantum phases, such as pair-density waves in superconductors and in helium superfluids, intertwined phases in low-dimensional superfluids, and pasta phases in neutron stars. Our work might open directions for the realization of materials with novel functionalities.

Mots-clés : superfluids,quantum solids,quantum phase transitions
Projet ERC : DDME (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Stuttgart — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2056149.0 €

DDME sets up a bottom-up, co-creative and deliberative design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens´ democratic preferences in two Western (Germany and United States) and one non-Western country (India). Democratic preferences contain procedural preferences for different governance modes – such as participatory, delegative, consensual or majoritarian forms of democratic governance – as well as preferences for democratic goals and values - such as equality or social justice. Based on input and feedback from democratic theorists, DDME explores how citizens imagine “ideal” democracy (on “Mars”) and mend “real” democracy (i.e., how they would reform the political systems they live in (on “Earth”)) when they had the chance to deliberate, i.e. to ´weigh´ reasons regarding the pros and cons of the various conceptions and schemes of democracy in a dialogical setting with their fellow citizens. The deliberative field experiments will comprise 600-900 representative or maximally diverse citizens and will be run on a “hybrid” platform combining synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction. DDME analyses which factors drive different democratic preferences of citizens in the three different countries and which principles and arguments play a role in the opinion and preference formation of citizens´ democratic preferences (with a specific eye on opinion and preference change). The project is the first to delegate democratic designing to citizens adopting a systematic and global approach where citizens together with democratic theorists think through advanced theoretical inputs and think creatively about optimal democratic designs.

Mots-clés : deliberation,democratic theory,public opinion,citizen perspectives
Projet ERC : ULMI (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université de Constance — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3159425.0 €

Atoms and electrons are the central building blocks of almost all materials around us. Whenever there is a process or change, the atoms and the electrons have to move from initial to final configurations. These movements are very fast and very small: nanometers to picometers in space and femtoseconds to attoseconds in time. Ultrafast electron microscopy can provide a movie-like access, but we can only see processes that are excited by special laser light, although many reaction phenomena in nature proceed with a much less specific stimulus. This project has two major aims. (a) We will use sequences of ultrashort electron pulses to develop novel ways to understand ultrasmall and ultrafast material dynamics with nanometer/atomic control. (b) We will advance ultrafast spectroscopy and imaging towards a statistical investigation of reaction dynamics as they occur in unspecific ways. We will become capable of understanding reaction dynamics on atomic scales and obtain first-ever insight into femtosecond processes in so far unobservable regimes. Based on these new capabilities, we will investigate a broad range of questions in materials science, nanophotonics, electronic circuitry, magnetism, chemistry and atomic physics, in order to better understand and optimize the functionality of advanced materials for technology and life.
Projet ERC : ROMEO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Saragosse — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3121375.0 €

Today cancer remains a huge health concern, with around 20 million new cases and 10 million deaths per year worldwide. However, according to expectations, Nanomedicine should have ended cancer long time ago. The first nanomedicine (DoxilTM) a liposomal formulation based on the Enhanced Permeation and Retention (EPR) effect, dates from 1995. In the ensuing three decades, hundreds of anticancer nanoparticles with exciting properties were developed, but only a handful have reached the clinic, with rather limited effectiveness. Recent research has identified the root causes of the failure of Nanomedicine in cancer, which can be narrowed down to two problems: first, most nanoparticles (NPs) end up in the liver, trapped by Kupffer cells (KCs) in the slow-flow sinusoids; second, of the small fraction of NPs that escape KCs most fail at delivering therapy to tumor cells, ending up in off-target cells.  ROMEO has been specifically conceived to address these problems and produce a therapeutic vector able to escape KCs, while guaranteeing a high tumor cell targeting capability. To achieve this, we will combine i) extracellular vesicles (EVs) as delivery vectors of high selectivity and ii) optimized NPs, as decoys able to saturate KCs uptake capacity. A novel approach, importing chemical engineering concepts (microfluidics, competitive adsorption/reaction kinetics) will provide actionable information to improve successive generations of EVs, NPs and feeding schemes in order to keep KCs saturated and maximize delivery to tumor cells. The solutions will be validated in a ground-breaking experimental design that circumvents previous problems of in vivo experiments. The final deliverable of ROMEO will be optimized EVs containing a therapeutic load, able to survive repeated sinusoid passes thanks to the optimal feeding of decoy NPs, and with a proven ability to target tumor cells. If successful, the main problem preventing the success of cancer nanomedicine will have been solved.

Mots-clés : adsorption reaction kinetics,microfluidic contactors,nanomedicine
Projet ERC : CENTRIC-BRAIN (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 456223.75 €

Personalized tumor immunotherapy - vaccines and T cell therapies - requires the selection of few immunogenic epitopes recognized by tumor-reactive T cell receptors (TCRs) from thousands of potential tumor antigens in each tumor. This selection is a huge challenge, particularly in brain tumors, where access to tumor tissue is limited and tumor-infiltrating T cells (TILs) are sparse. CENTRIC-BRAIN will reverse this epitope-centric approach by directly harnessing tumor-reactive orphan TCRs from TILs for personalized brain tumor immunotherapy. Using human brain tumor tissue we have developed and experimentally validated predicTCR, a novel approach using machine learning and explainable AI to derive a classifier that predicts tumor-reactivity of such orphan TCRs based on the expression of signature genes with > 90% accuracy across multiple tumour entities. CENTRIC-BRAIN will employ predicTCR to develop a personalized adoptive cell therapy using transgenic T cells with tumor-specific TCRs and improved function. CENTRIC-BRAIN hypothesizes that the signature genes underlying predicTCR determine the phenotypic and functional properties of tumor-reactive T cells and that predicted tumor-reactive orphan TCRs can be employed for adoptive therapy with personalized TCR-transgenic T cells. Aim 1 will refine predicTCR by characterizing the transcriptional programs and spatial distribution of tumor-reactive T cells in human brain tumor samples. Aim 2 will define the functional relevance of transcriptional programs for tumor-reactive T cells in syngeneic humanized and patient-derived xenograft brain tumor models. Aim 3 will validate the predicted tumor-reactive orphan TCRs by adoptive transfer of T cells genetically engineered to express predicted tumor-reactive TCRs. CENTRIC-BRAIN will thus revolutionize precise and efficient implementation of personalized adoptive cell therapy for brain tumors using T cells expressing tumor-reactive patient-derived orphan TCRs.
Projet ERC : BIOSSCI (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : International center for living aquatic resources — Pays : Malaisie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ICLARM THE WORLD FISH CENTER
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 307560.0 €

Biosecurity, the management of biological threats to humans, animals, and environments, is critical for health, economy, pandemic preparedness, and food security. In agricultural settings, it involves protecting livestock and workers from infectious diseases. The tendency is to take an engineering approach, aiming to minimise system breaches or failures. But this Biosecurity I approach is failing. Infection pressures are growing with climate and other environmental changes. Resulting livestock systems can make animals and landscapes less resilient and expose farms and workers to greater risks. Implementation costs are high, non-compliant farms can be excluded from markets, resulting in rural poverty and increased disease threat. Biosecurity I is ill-fitted to low income and sub-tropical settings and can generate socially unjust and neo-colonial outcomes. Radical new thinking is needed.  The alternative is to learn from those who successfully manage biological threats under varying conditions. In this approach, safety involves more than minimising breaches. It requires that many matters or ‘goods’ are managed effectively. Biosecurity II, biosocial security, is the careful arrangement of people, animals, materials, and markets in ways that make life safe. Lessons need to be learned concerning how this is achieved and how things can be improved. This ground-breaking project reverses the usual top-down flow of biosecurity knowledge. It will work with farmers and policymakers in Bangladesh, South Africa, and the UK to understand how biosecurity works in practice. The project team will generate empirically and conceptually informed social science knowledge on those practices. The field knowledge will be used to exnovate future approaches to biosecurity, exploring alternative institutional and policy practices. Developing innovative methods and theory, the PI-led team will generate a step change in social science approaches to a key twenty-first century issue.

Mots-clés : biosecurity food human nonhuman relations science policy epidemiology disease health
Projet ERC : ExCEED (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

A thorough understanding of stellar evolution is key to nearly any branch of astrophysics. The majority of stars evolves in binary or multiple systems and interactions often occur between their components. Such dynamical interaction phases are pivotal for the fate of the system and its constituents, but they elude classical stellar modeling. Common-envelope phases, in which a compact companion spirals into the envelope of a giant primary star, are the glaring gaps in our knowledge and pose one of the last unsolved fundamental problems to stellar astrophysics.  The ExCEED project breaks new ground by developing a strategy to reach a comprehensive understanding of common-envelope evolution. It combines leading three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic moving-mesh simulations with innovative models of physical processes to decipher the dynamical interaction between the stellar cores and the envelope material. On this basis, the post-common envelope evolution is explored by consistently linking to classical one-dimensional models. Predictions for astronomical observables are derived and a faithful effective prescription for representing common-envelope phases in binary stellar evolution and population synthesis calculations is constructed.  The new understanding of common-envelope evolution provided by the ExCEED project marks a break- through in stellar astrophysics and has implications beyond this field. ExCEED finally settles the long- standing questions of the mechanism of envelope ejection and the orbital separation of the post-common envelope remnant binary system. This allows to understand the formation of the targets of gravitational- wave astronomy that holds promise to solve problems of fundamental physics, the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae, and many other astrophysical events.

Mots-clés : binary stellar evolution,common envelope phases,numerical simulations,computational fluid dynamics
Projet ERC : HIPERCOPS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2488013.0 €

The future of modern sustainable technologies lies in the exploitation of solar energy and in harnessing the sun’s practically infinite energy. For fundamental as well as target-oriented research in this direction, computer simulations of the ongoing photochemical processes and electronic spectroscopy of the underlying molecular materials are indispensable. While for smaller molecules, computational photochemistry can nowadays provide highly accurate results and reliable predictions, the limit in applicable molecular system size is quickly reached, and the obtained results often come with an unpredictable error requiring a posteriori validation. Indeed, we are lacking efficient and sufficiently accurate and reliable excited-state ab initio methods reaching out for organic molecular systems with more than 500 second-row atoms. In HIPERCOPS, we aim at closing this gap by deriving highly efficient and genuinely parallel ab initio methods for the calculation of excited electronic, electron-detached and electron-attached states for execution on modern high-performance computer architectures, whose full potential is impossible to leverage by existing standard quantum chemical program packages. To address this problem, we choose the algebraic-diagrammatic construction (ADC) family of methods, since these schemes offer clear advantages, for instance, numerical stability, easy to use, predictable accuracy. We will exploit novel genuinely parallel concepts and solution strategies for ADC schemes to enable them for HPC architectures. Our developed methods and resulting easy-to-use software will thus push the boundaries of accurate and predictable computational photochemistry to unprecedented molecular system sizes enabling and promoting research in, for example, the areas of functional optoelectronic devices and photovoltaics, molecular solar thermal energy conversion, solar-driven nanomachines, towards efficient molecular harnessing of sun light.
Projet ERC : SCALE-NT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2496473.0 €

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) feature outstanding electronic (high carrier mobilities) and optical (narrow near-infrared absorption and emission) properties. To harness these properties for functional materials and devices, they must be separated into purely semiconducting, metallic or even single-chirality SWNTs. The currently available separation methods are either expensive, not scalable or require harmful chemicals and solvents. Likewise, the subsequent processing of SWNTs into optical probes for bio-imaging, sensors, electronic circuits or thermoelectrics is far from sustainable. Both issues have so far prevented the widespread application of SWNTs despite their excellent properties. These problems cannot be addressed by tweaking parameters but require new approaches that take scalability and the environmental impact of the applied materials and processes into account, explore alternatives and expand our knowledge about the interactions of SWNTs with their environment to optimize new methods from the beginning. SCALE-NT aims to  (i) explore new methods for the dispersion, purification and sorting of SWNTs in benign solvents and with natural or bio-based dispersants; and scale-up these processes toward multi-gram amounts of sorted SWNTs in a sustainable manner. (ii) develop sustainable processes and materials for the fabrication of SWNT-based devices such as thin-film transistors on recyclable substrates, large-area thermoelectrics without harsh dopants, and biodegradable optical sensor arrays for organic pollutants based on tailored interactions with functionalized SWNTs. (iii) understand the interactions of SWNTs with their surroundings as required for sorting and optical sensing via advanced in-situ THz and near-infrared fluorescence spectroscopy.  With these objectives, SCALE-NT will help to finally establish SWNTs not only as highly functional but also more sustainable materials.

Mots-clés : carbon nanotubes,functionalization,thz spectroscopy,fluorescence,purification,sustainability,thermoelectrics,sensors,transistors,bio derived dispersants,biodegradable