Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : KinO (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de la Ruhr à Bochum — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Temperature is probably the most fundamental parameter is Earth sciences, but vigorously debated for most of Earth’s history. Temperature derived from carbonate 18O/16O isotope ratios (δ18Oc) can be biased by i) kinetic effects, ii) alteration, or iii) late precipitation of secondary carbonates. KinO shows that each of these mechanisms is expected to follow a different trajectory in δ18Oc vs. δ17Oc space. Within this triple oxygen isotope space, different precipitation mechanisms and different types of kinetic effects fall on characteristic slopes, allowing to correct for these effects, which allows attaining absolute paleo-temperatures. Oxygen isotopes are classically analysed in materials presumed to form in near-equilibrium with the water mainly aiming to attain paleo-temperatures. KinO follows a completely different paradigm by specifically focussing on materials with large kinetic isotope effects. This allows quantitative estimates for fundamental parameters other than temperature such as paleo-pH. Sulfate δ18OSO4 is in notorious disequilibrium with water. While sulfite (SO32-) equilibrates with water, the final oxidation step to sulfate (SO42-) induces a kinetic effect. KinO shows how the respective kinetic effects can be identified and corrected for, providing insight into the formation mechanisms, the respective physicochemical conditions (e.g. pH) and formation temperatures. This approach can provide an alteration resistant paleo-thermometer for the Archean. The methodological development proposed in KinO will be employed to understand marine C and O isotope excursions in the geological record including the Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum (PETM) and the Neoproterozoic Shurham anomaly. The later represents the largest negative carbon excursion on Earth and precedes the Cambrian explosion of life. The PETM represents the most recent equivalent of a CO2 and CH4 induced climatic excursion associated with the sixth largest mass extinction.

Mots-clés : oxygen isotopes,kinetic isotope effects,paleo environment,paleo temperature
Projet ERC : DimLearn (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de la Ruhr à Bochum — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1136731.5 €

Our visual system frequently has to classify complex, high dimensional inputs. A key learning objective of the brain is thus to identify diagnostic dimensions. Often, tasks require simultaneous consideration of multiple dimensions. Yet, learning many dimensions is computationally challenging. Here, I ask how the visual system tackles the challenge of learning high dimensional tasks. Some theories suggest that the brain does so by compressing dimensions, while others suggest dimensionality expansion. Yet, dimensionality compression and expansion both have advantages and disadvantages, and some studies find dimensionality compression where others find expansion. This raises the hitherto unanswered question what determines whether the brain invokes either of the two strategies. I hypothesize that instead of settling on a single strategy, the brain can reap the benefits of dimensionality compression and expansion by flexibly adjusting dimensionality to the task at hand. This entails the novel prediction of flexible neural codes that can switch dimensionality. To test this theory, I build on a multimodal, multispecies approach I have developed to study learning: using the paradigmatic case of visual category learning, I will establish the effect of task dimensionality on the structure of mental representations in behavior, I will determine how task dimensionality transforms neural activity using neuroimaging in humans, I will identify the neural building blocks of flexible dimensionality using electrophysiology and causal perturbations in rhesus monkeys, and I will unravel computational principles of flexible dimensionality with artificial neural networks. This combination of species and techniques is ideally suited to unravel the neural mechanisms for coping with high dimensional tasks. By elucidating the flexibility of mental and neural representations, I aim to reveal a hitherto unknown principle governing learning and stimulate future educational applications.

Mots-clés : vision dimensionality category learning human macaque monkey fmri electrophysiology microstimulation psychophysics artificial neural networks
Projet ERC : CompleX (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Istituto nazionale di fisica nucleare — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : INFN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 338600.0 €

Silicon sensors have been extensively exploited in high-energy physics experiments in the past 40 years, from their first use in NA11 at the SPS (CERN) to their application in the present-day design of very large particle trackers. The capability of silicon sensors to work in environments with high radiation levels has been of utmost importance for experiments at accelerating machines with very energetic and intense particle beams. Presently available silicon sensors can operate efficiently up to particle fluences of 2E16/cm2, while future frontier accelerators envisage the use of silicon sensors in environments with fluences exceeding 5E17/cm2. If not overcome, this gap will prevent the use of silicon sensors in future hadron-collider experiments.  CompleX aims at extending the range of operation of silicon detectors by more than one order of magnitude, up to a fluence of 5E17/cm2. The idea behind this unprecedented target in radiation tolerance relies on a novel understanding of the saturation of the radiation damage and on the advantages that compensated implants bring to radiation hardness. The application of these two breakthroughs to thin silicon sensors (20–40 microns) with an internal gain of 10–20 will allow the design of sensors able to operate up to the target fluence.  I am the PI of three projects to develop silicon sensors for extreme fluences (eXFlu – INFN, eXFlu-innova – AIDAinnova, FLEX – UNITO), which represent preparatory developments for the CompleX proposal. In this context, I introduced the principle of doping compensation in silicon sensors to the detector community. My expertise in the design and testing of silicon sensors, my involvement in radiation hardness studies, and my experience in project coordination qualify me as a recognised expert in the development of sensors for extreme fluences and enable me, as PI, to target the CompleX goals.

Mots-clés : particle tracking,silicon sensors,extreme fluences,lgad
Projet ERC : PolymeRNA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université de Wurtzbourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999998.75 €

The tragic outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic stimulated research to go beyond common grounds and develop powerful vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A new vaccine technology based on messenger RNA (mRNA) was translated into almost one billion patients and saved millions of lives. It addresses the needs of rapid, scalable and adaptable vaccine production. However, mRNAs require potent nanocarriers to prevent the RNA strands from extracellular degradation and enable their uptake into antigen-presenting cells. During urgent development, established lipid-based nanoparticles (LNPs) were used for mRNA encapsulation, yet, they provided limited long-term stability and required strict temperature storages, which prevented their distribution to locations with no cold storage options. Moreover, several patients experienced hard-to-control immunological adverse effects that were associated with some of the lipid components. In my ERC proposal, I therefore want to pioneer a novel and unprecedented macromolecular approach that will overcome these issues and introduce polymer-based and lipid-free, lyophilizable nanocarriers for intelligent mRNA delivery. I will generate self-immolative poly(carbonate)s with reductive decationizable features for controlled RNA complexation, as well as stimuli-responsive release and carrier depolymerization upon entry into antigen-presenting cells. Co-delivery of small molecule immune modulators will enable precise control over quality and quantity of the pursued humoral and cellular immune responses. Moreover, reversible core-crosslinking and surface conjugation with relevant targeting units will foster systemic in vivo applications towards immunization against infectious diseases and cancer. Elaborating multi-responsive macromolecular tools on an mRNA-binding polymer will become a groundbreaking asset for mRNA delivery, circumvent today’s still not overcome hurdles and enhance its access to and acceptance by the general public.

Mots-clés : mrna delivery biodegradable polymers immuno engineering stimuli responsive nano vaccine
Projet ERC : bacRBP (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Université de Wurtzbourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999625.0 €

All organisms use diverse modes of cellular control as they cope with changing environments. Central to these processes are RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) that impact the stability, translation, or localization of bound RNAs. While RBPs typically have distinct RNA-binding domains, a growing number of proteins that lack these domains are found to interact with RNA as well. In prokaryotes, such unconventional RBPs remain largely unexplored, in part because methods for global RNA interactome capture (RIC) in bacteria are missing. My group recently made a breakthrough in developing a novel RIC approach for bacteria that relies on primary transcript capture (CoCAP). Our pilot study successfully captured known RBPs but also uncovered numerous new RBP candidates, including metabolic or cell division proteins. We also identified a pair of widespread KH-domain proteins (KhpA/B) with links to the RNA degradosome and cell division. This points towards a wealth of unexplored RBPs involved in cellular control in bacteria. My ERC CoG proposal aims to explore the identity and functional diversity of novel RBPs in bacteria. My overarching hypothesis is that a vast, unexplored universe of unconventional RBPs exists in bacteria that play crucial roles in cellular physiology. I will tackle this through three objectives leveraging two model bacteria (Salmonella and Campylobacter) with different sets of canonical RBPs. I propose to:  1) Elucidate bacterial primary RBPomes during stress- and infection-relevant conditions. 2) Identify mechanisms and cellular functions of two widely conserved KH-domain RBPs. 3) Determine how cell division RBPs influence and are influenced by bound RNAs.  Our proposed work will provide a broadly applicable method for primary RBPome capture and vastly expand the set of bacterial RBPs. Their characterization in turn will reveal new layers of cellular control and establish new targets for industrial strain engineering and antimicrobial treatments.

Mots-clés : rbp rna binding protein,rnp ribonucleoprotein,rna protein complexes,small rnas,regulatory rnas,post transcriptional regulation,riboregulation,enigmrbp,moonlighting enzymes,bacterial cell division,pathogenic bacteria,campylobacter jejuni,salmonella
Projet ERC : INTERACT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Université de la Ruhr à Bochum — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2201834.0 €

Developing high-energy-density rechargeable battery technologies is essential to solve energy and environmental problems. However, its development is currently impeded by a poor understanding of elementary processes occurring at electrode/electrolyte interfaces. Several long-standing issues such as short cycle life, low Coulombic efficiency and hazardous dendrite formation in batteries cannot be fundamentally solved due to the knowledge gap. The bottleneck is that interfacial chemistry on the atomic-scale is as yet unresolved, owing to the lack of sufficiently suitable analytical capabilities. I will address this gap using atom probe tomography, coupled with a highly innovative cryogenic sample preparation and transfer platform, to provide atomic-scale insights into solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) formed at the electrode/electrolyte interface. The key open questions to answer are: i) what is the composition and elemental distribution in a stable SEI? ii) how do ions in the electrolytes affect SEI formation? iii) how does stable SEI inhibit dendrite formation? My goal is to advance fundamental understanding of SEI formation, establish its structure-property relationships, and elucidate its interplay with other elementary processes occurring at electrode/electrolyte interfaces in a lithium metal battery model system. I will i) reveal elemental distribution and compositional details of SEI in/under different electrolytes and working conditions; ii) unveil compositional evolution of SEI and the electrolytes during charging and discharging; and iii) interrogate their roles in dendrite formation in a half and full battery cell, respectively. These unique data will shed atomistic insights into how to tailor SEI and electrode/electrolyte interfaces to mitigate long-standing issues. Furthermore, the novel cryogenic platform is not system-specific and will be applicable for studying other liquid- or solid-state-electrolyte battery technologies.

Mots-clés : atom probe tomography
Projet ERC : PREDDYCT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Conseil national de la recherche — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 99853.75 €

Climate predictions are our most valuable tools to support socio-economic decision-making from regional to local scales and develop successful adaptation strategies. Their level of accuracy is determined by our understanding of the climate system and our capacity to simulate it correctly. While current prediction models exhibit high skill in predicting sea surface temperature in key regions – like the North Atlantic or the Tropical Pacific – from months to years in advance, their ability to predict the atmospheric circulation and through it the continental climate is undermined by structural model problems. These problems point to a misrepresentation of key processes and interactions. PREDDYCT focuses on the North Atlantic, the region where the structural problems manifest more clearly. Its aim is to bring a new fundamental understanding of the physical mechanisms that need to be realistically simulated to provide climate predictability to its neighbouring continents. The main working hypothesis is that mesoscale eddies – whose contribution is unresolved in current prediction models – are the key element. This is supported by the fact that in the North Atlantic region, resolving the effect of mesoscale ocean eddies and the atmospheric eddy feedback onto the midlatitude jet has been shown to critically improve the realism of air-sea interactions and their influence on the large-scale atmospheric circulation. In light of this, PREDDYCT will combine a new generation of predictions at ground-breaking resolutions, an innovative tuning framework to enhance their accuracy, and extensive process-oriented analyses to, for the first time, resolve and understand the contribution of mesoscale eddies to North Atlantic climate predictability. PREDDYCT’s new conceptual and methodological insights will pave the way for further forecasting advances at the global scale and contribute to achieve a long-awaited breakthrough in the realism and trustworthiness of climate predictions.

Mots-clés : climate prediction,high resolution climate modelling,air sea interactions and feedbacks,ocean and atmospheric dynamics
Projet ERC : TANGO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Université polytechnique de Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2715696.0 €

Semiconductors, halfway between metals and insulators, are at the heart of the optoelectronic applications that have revolutionized our world for the last 70 years. Their hallmark characteristic is the existence of two electronic bands—the conduction and valence bands (CB and VB)—separated by a forbidden energy gap, which enables electrical and optical access to two distinct electronic populations. 3-band materials (3BM) represent a new class of semiconductor featuring three electronic bands and three energy gaps (one between each pair of bands). The driving force behind two decades of 3BM research has been the development of high-efficiency solar cells. Yet, all the attempts to fabricate an operational 3-band solar cell either failed or proved to be unpractical mainly due to a fundamental reason: the impossibility of the 3BM candidates to maintain three distinct electronic populations at room temperature (RT), due to strong interband thermal coupling. TANGO aims to overcome this hurdle by implementing an innovative band-engineering strategy. A family of functional 3BMs will be achieved via precise tailoring of the band structure of hybrid heterocrystals comprising quantum dots (QD) in a perovskite matrix (QDIP). In this approach, the QD electronic states give rise to a third band thermally decoupled from the VB and CB even at RT. The successful implementation of QDIP-based 3BMs (Objective 1) will permit the fabrication of the first operational 3-band solar cell (Objective 2), setting a new landmark that could lead to cheap high-efficiency photovoltaics.Beyond solar cells, the unique properties of 3BMs, which allow for external access to three electronic populations, will be leveraged to develop a groundbreaking device: the 3-band transistor (Objective 3), able to switch among three logic states. The demonstration of such a 3-state element would imply a breakthrough in the field of multivalued digital logic, which promises enhanced computation and storage capacity.

Mots-clés : quantum dot in perovskite,intermediate band solar cells,halide perovskites,colloidal quantum dots
Projet ERC : DynaQuant (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998750.0 €

The interplay of correlations and quantum fluctuations in condensed matter can give rise to topological phases with unexpected and exciting properties. While originally proposed for fractional quantum Hall states, recently new opportunities arose for realizing and controlling topological order: Quantum computers have demonstrated the fascinating fractionalized statistics of topological excitations and moiré semiconductors have appeared as promising candidates for realizing topological order. However, it remains an important open challenge to understand the dynamical response of such entangled matter, both on the fundamental level as well as for providing key experimental signatures that characterize these phases. The central focus of the project DynaQuant is to develop new concepts and new theoretical methods to study the dynamical response of topological quantum states. The project has three principal objectives each of which would represent a major contribution to the field: (O1) To introduce new dynamical probes tailored toward emerging experimental platforms that enable the detection of unique signatures of equilibrium phases with topological order. (O2) To demonstrate the response of pristine nonequilibrium phases with Floquet topological order that do not possess analogues in thermal equilibrium. (O3) To develop novel tensor network approaches for fracton topological order and investigate the collective dynamics of their excitations.  To successfully meet our ambitious objectives, my team and I will develop complementary analytical and numerical approaches. This allows us to understand fundamental dynamical properties of entangled quantum matter and to guide future experiments. Due to the international effort in developing experimental platforms for realizing topological order, it is now the right time to foster a deep understanding of their dynamical response, which is the central goal of the project DynaQuant.

Mots-clés : strongly correlated many body systems,tensor network states,quantum phases with topological order both in and out of thermal equilibrium,fractional chern insulators,quantum spin liquids,fracton quantum matter,moire semiconductor heterostructures of transition metal dichacogenides tmds,noisy intermediate scale quantum nisq devices