Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : NIMBLE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2461515.0 €

Nano-bubbles exhibit several unique physical and mechanical characteristics, such as dramatically reduced buoyancy, extremely high surface area/volume ratio, large zeta potentials, enhanced solubility of gas in water. These properties render them good candidates for several commercial applications, such as fine-particle flotation, wastewater treatment, and in food and agricultural industries. A most important challenge lies in establishing facile and easily-controlled methods to promote nano-bubble formation, and, indeed, liquid-phase nano-droplets, i.e., in realising reproducibly and consistently a nano-phase. NIMBLE revolutionises formation of the nano-phase, providing substantial enhancement in effective gas/liquid solubility in water and aqueous media. Further, energy demands are very low visà-vis other nanobubble-generating technologies, with nanobubble stability over months. A ‘Grand Challenge’ lies in understanding underlying mechanistic phenomena involved in nano-phase formation, and the metastability of pure nanobubbles. Indeed, developing experimental and theoretical insights into controlled, on-demand release for nanobubbles is also vital for efficient process-engineering applications. In this ERC ‘NIMBLE’ project, state-of-the-art computer-simulation methods in molecular and larger- (continuum-) scale will be employed in tandem with advanced experimental set-ups and techniques to investigate and manipulate mechanisms of nano-phase formation in the presence of electric fields (Work-Package 1), as well as its controlled, on-demand release (Work-Package 4), with applications to carbon capture and agriculture using nanobubbles’ “carrier” personality. NIMBLE will employ state-of-the-art experimental and simulation methods to investigate and manipulate nano-phase formation in electric fields and controlled release and study their mobility and carrier agency, with applications in carbon capture, water treatment and agriculture.

Mots-clés : nano bubbles
Projet ERC : BRIDGE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université catholique de Louvain — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499560.0 €

Symmetric & asymmetric cryptography offer the basic functionalities needed to communicate securely over a channel. Due to their different features and the different algebraic structures they exploit, the interaction between the design of these primitives and the security of their implementation against side-channel & fault attacks so far followed somewhat separated paths. Based on the observation that (i) many emerging challenges for the implementation security of symmetric & asymmetric primitives share similarities and would highly benefit from a more connected approach, and (ii) this is especially true when considering post-quantum asymmetric encryption schemes that include symmetric components and for which current designs are extremely challenging to protect against side-channel & faults attacks, the BRIDGE project aims to develop a unified treatment of symmetric & asymmetric cryptography by leveraging three innovative movements. First, we aim to export the concept of levelled implementation (where different parts of a primitive are protected with countermeasures of varying cost) from symmetric cryptography towards new post-quantum asymmetric schemes that inherently take implementation security as a design criteria. Second, we aim to export the use of larger (possibly prime) fields and more complex algebraic structures used in asymmetric cryptography to deliver advanced functionalities towards new symmetric schemes that guarantee security against side-channel & fault attacks in low-noise contexts that raise fundamental challenges for existing countermeasures. Third, we aim to exploit hard physical learning problems as radically new building blocks applicable to both types of primitives. By combining these movements, we aim to identify disruptive approaches to build new cryptographic schemes offering a better integration between symmetric & asymmetric designs and improvements of their implementation security by orders of magnitude.

Mots-clés : symmetric cryptography,asymmetric cryptography,post quantum cryptography,hard learning problems,side channel attacks,fault attacks,leakage resilience,fault resilience,secure implementations
Projet ERC : SPOTLESS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 400000.0 €

Exoplanet research has experienced enormous growth and is now pushing instrumental limits to find temperate terrestrial planets and precisely characterise their atmospheres. Extreme-precision radial velocity (RV) instruments (e.g. ESPRESSO), offering 10 cm/s stability, and space telescopes (e.g. JWST, Ariel), attaining relative flux uncertainties of 10 ppm are becoming a reality. But there is a shadow of concern hovering over such fantastic performances. The intrinsic variability of the stellar hosts can overwhelm the instrument error to become the dominant uncertainty. Recent results with ESPRESSO and JWST data provide vivid illustrations of the daunting effects of such limiting factor. An ambitious, ground-breaking, and comprehensive effort to model and correct out stellar activity effects shall therefore be undertaken. Our pioneering results show that the unique combination of a physical model and contemporaneous multi-technique monitoring can disentangle the effects of stellar activity from RV time-series and transit spectroscopy. The SPOTLESS project will implement this methodology by building a realistic stellar activity simulator and develop correction strategies using, e.g., machine learning algorithms and direct inversion. This is more reliable than purely data-driven methods, which often suffer from overfitting due to the lack of a physical context. Four main objectives will be pursued: 1) A physical model of the active solar surface to explain Sun-as-a-star observables, 2) Generalise to other spectral types & parameters, 3) Physically-motivated RV activity corrections at 10 cm/s, and 4) Physically-motivated transit activity corrections at 10 ppm. From available and future observations, SPOTLESS will deliver new challenging exoplanet RV discoveries and unbiased transmission spectra, taking exoplanet research to the next level by enabling the detection and characterisation of exoearths, and the eventual search for signs of biological activity.
Projet ERC : SUL4LIFE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2191875.0 €

Sulphur is the tenth most abundant element in the Universe and is known to play a significant role in biological systems. Moreover, some sulphur compounds have been proposed as necessary catalysts to form amino acids in the interstellar medium. However, while the carbon and oxygen budgets have been extensively studied, sulphur is the only element whose gas-phase abundance is still uncertain by several orders of magnitude, hindering the usage of elemental sulphur abundance as a reliable tool to probe planet formation. This lack of information is due to the scarcity of observations, specially in protoplanetary disks, and the still large uncertainties in the sulphur chemical network. This project takes a decisive step to fix our knowledge of the sulphur chemistry with an innovative methodology that rests on three pillars: (i) To create an unprecedented database of high quality observations of sulphur-bearing molecules which allows us to trace the sulphur content from the natal molecular clouds to protoplanetary disks. Observations of the awarded IRAM Large Program GEMS have already provided part of this database. (ii) To perform ab initio calculations and laboratory experiments to estimate the key reaction rates that are needed to fix the sulphur network and make chemical models reliable. Now, we know that the chemical composition of planet-forming disks is to a large extent inherited from the earliest phases of star formation. (iii) To perform bi-fluid (gas+dust) 3D magneto-hydrodynamics simulations with chemistry coupled (chemo-MHD) to follow the chemical evolution of the material from the natal cloud to the planet-forming sites, and hence, to obtain accurate chemical predictions. This can be extensively done by using artificial inteligence to reduce the computing time. At the end, this project will disentangle how sulphur was delivered to protoplanetary disks, which is an essential step to understand planet formation and the emergence of life.

Mots-clés : astrochemistry,star formation
Projet ERC : GLOSSI (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2479125.0 €

Disease driven amphibian declines are frequently compared to the extinction of dinosaurs and have become an icon of the global biodiversity crisis. The deadly skin disease chytridiomycosis is causing the greatest recorded loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease. The recently introduced chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) is expanding its range in Europe, remains unmitigated and thus poses an imminent threat to western Palearctic urodele (= salamanders and newts) diversity. While hypersusceptible species invariably die after exposure, other species show a much more variable, individual and dose dependent response, ranging from self-limiting infections with self-cure to lethal disease. My group recently discovered that host susceptibility correlates with the skin glycosylation pattern of salamanders, with cutaneous galactose content predicting variation in intensity of Bsal colonization. The variability of the skin glycosylation pattern offers a unique opportunity for marker directed selection of disease resistant salamanders. The overarching hypothesis of GLOSSI (Glycosylation in Salamander Skin Infection) is that variability of hereditary glycosylation patterns in the salamander skin underpins differential Bsal colonization and allows the selection of colonization resistant host lineages. To study the contribution of skin glycosylation patterns towards the development of salamander resistance against the Bsal epidemic, GLOSSI will combine laboratory and field trials to study 1) the temporal dynamics and heritability of glycosylation patterns and associated susceptibility to Bsal infection in urodeles, 2) the potential of natural selection towards increased resistance in infected, natural urodele populations and its impact on population dynamics, 3) the host genetics that underpin the epidermal glycosylation pattern and implications for disease resistance. GLOSSI will lead to novel strategies for curbing disease driven loss of biodiversity.

Mots-clés : wildlife diseases,chytridiomycosis,mitigation,skin colonisation
Projet ERC : ISYS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2302500.0 €

This proposal is set in the era of the second quantum revolution, in which there is a strong need for a computational framework to describe and simulate topological materials and quantum devices possessing exotic particle statistics. * The two leading actors: symmetries and tensor networks. * The story: while the topological materials seem to defy Landau’s symmetry breaking paradigm as they do not exhibit a local order parameter, tensor networks strike back with the emergence of a local “pulling-through” symmetry of the local tensors describing them. * The catch: the symmetry happens in the shadow world of entanglement degrees of freedom, is in general non-invertible, and speaks the language of bimodule categories. * The magic: the tensor network picture makes the abstract concepts and mathematical tools needed to describe topological and critical systems, such as cohomology theory and bimodule categories, very tangible and concrete as wavefunctions of quantum spin systems which can easily be put on a computer. * The mission: develop the mathematics of tensor network representations of (higher) categorical and non-invertible symmetries; construct a computational toolbox which exploits those symmetries; construct explicit matrix product operator intertwiners for dualities between theories with non-Abelian / categorical symmetries; construct novel CFTs from categorical data; create a bridge between bimodule categories and integrability. * The crescendo: tensor networks with categorical symmetries take over the world by 1. setting up real-space renormalization group flows in which unwanted relevant perturbations are crushed and 2.constructing and evaluating quantum error correcting codes based on non-Abelian anyons. * The take-away: deep theoretical ideas and state of the art computational aspects are not parallel lines of development, but are one and the same and must be fused with each other. * The moral: For things to remain the same, everything must change.

Mots-clés : tensor networks,entanglement,renormalization group,fusion categories,categorical symmetry
Projet ERC : PURANA (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Leyde — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499331.0 €

The Puranas (Primordial Texts) constitute the most voluminous and enduring genre of Sanskrit literature. These anonymous texts narrate the mythic cycles associated with the major deities of Hinduism (Visnu, Siva, Brahma, the Goddess, etc.). The Puranas have also been integral to processes of ‘place-making’ by creating maps of geography and celebrating the salvific potential of sacred sites in myths that imbue the landscape with divine agency. While many important Puranas were first recorded and circulated in the first millennium CE—a time of significant social change marked by the flourishing of regional devotional movements and innovations of temple and image-centered religious practices— the genre has remained a living tradition through the colonial period until the present day. Despite the tradition’s centrality for cultural production in South Asia, we know very little about their historical embeddedness, as the Puranic composers and transmitters—in accordance with the anonymity characteristic of the genre—disguised their own historicity behind claims of ‘primordiality’ and divinely inspired teachings. More than just a body of literature, the Puranas are a dynamic mythical discourse. PURANA makes a critical intervention in the field by tracing the composition, transmission, translation, and agency of the Puranas as a transregional and transhistorical process involving multiple actors, audiences, and geographic contexts—from Hindu scribes and Persian poets to Portuguese Jesuits and Khmer rulers. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we argue that the Puranas’ mythical discourse underlies and unites the religio-political culture of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis—establishing what we call a ‘Puranic Ecumene’: a vast part of the inhabited premodern world united by a distinctive mythical discourse, a hegemonic vision of the integration of society and cosmos, and a remarkable way of anchoring the present in the continuing ancient past.

Mots-clés : sanskrit hinduism south and southeast asia mythology
Projet ERC : New Polities (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499750.0 €

In the history of political thought, Late Antiquity is usually considered the period when the city-state gave way to monarchy and the Bible and Qur’an took the place of Plato. With a focus on kingship and religion, late antique political thinking – so the story goes – represents the antithesis of modern republicanism and secularism. For far too long, this teleological perspective has directed scholars toward a narrow range of topics and inhibited the recognition of different narratives and integration of non-Western traditions. Instead of seeing this period as the end of the paradigmatic ancient polity (namely the polis), New Polities proposes that it was a beginning: an age of new polities. Indeed, it witnessed the spread and consolidation of new religious, ethnic and political communities. Their use of ancient political language to describe themselves sparked a proliferation of political discourse into new contexts. To uncover the innovation and variety thus generated, New Polities expands the scope of research in a three-fold way. 1) It embraces the first millennium from the Roman Empire to the Abbasid, Byzantine and Carolingian empires, when different traditions crystallised from a common pool of late antique material. 2) It shifts the focus away from classical treatises and languages (e.g. Augustine & Al-Farabi) to a wider array of sources in many more languages from a broader range of cultures (e.g. Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew). This enlarged corpus allows to chart a greater breadth of ideas and possible cross-cultural influences. 3) It introduces little-studied topics, such as oikonomia and the relation between human society and nature. Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, New Polities not only recovers the formation, circulation, and adaptation of political ideas in the first millennium, but also foregrounds the importance of late antique and early medieval societies in the wider history of political thought.

Mots-clés : political thought late antiquity medieval mediterranean
Projet ERC : VIGILIA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2490000.0 €

This project is motivated by the hypothesis that we are approaching a post-truth society, where it becomes practically impossible for anyone to distinguish fact from fiction in all but the most trivial questions. A main cause of this evolution is people’s innate dependence on cognitive heuristics to process information, which may lead to biases and poor decision making. These biases risk being amplified in a networked society, where people depend on others to form their opinions and judgments and to determine their actions. Contemporary generative Artificial Intelligence technologies may further exacerbate this risk, given their ability to fabricate and efficiently spread false but highly convincing information at an unprecedented scale. Combined with expected advances in virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality technologies, this may create an epistemic crisis with consequences that are hard to fully fathom: a post-truth era on steroids.  In the VIGILIA project, we will investigate a possible mitigation strategy. We propose to develop automated techniques for detecting triggers of cognitive biases and heuristics in humans when facing information, as well as their effect at an interpersonal level (their effect on trust, reputation, and information propagation), and at a societal level (in terms of possible irrational behaviour and polarization). We aim to achieve this by leveraging techniques from AI itself, in particular Large Language Models, as well as by building on advanced user modelling approaches from the past ERC Consolidator Grant FORSIED. Our results will be integrated within tools that we refer to as VIrtual GuardIan AngeLs (VIGILs), aimed at news and social media consumers, journalists, scientific researchers, and political decision makers. Ethical questions arising will be identified and dealt with as first-class questions within the research project.

Mots-clés : post truth user modelling large language models mis,dis,and malinformation cognitive biases and heuristics
Projet ERC : Conformal-EIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Loránd Eötvös — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 423125.0 €

The primary goal of this research proposal is to lay the foundations for precision predictions for the physics program in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) at the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC). The commissioning of the EIC will open a new era in the exploration of the strong interaction physics and the hadron structure at an unprecedented level of detail. This is expected to lead, among other results, to the clarification of the proton spin puzzle. The crucial ingredient for the success of this undertaking is the ability to confront experimental data to precise predictions for a those benchmark processes, which will form a core part of the EIC physics program: inclusive lepton-hadron DIS, including polarized beams; DIS charm- or bottom-quark production; deeply-virtual Compton scattering in off-forward kinematics. Capitalizing on recent theoretical advances, driven to a significant extent by the work of the PI, this proposal outlines a challenging and ambitious program to advance quantum chromodynamics (QCD) perturbation theory in order to achieve a theoretical description of the key observables at the EIC at percent level precision. The proposal puts forward a novel research methodology based on the systematic use of conformal symmetry and integrability, as realized in gauge theories with extended supersymmetry, such as the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory to reveal structural information on QCD results. Observables in lepton-hadron DIS are particularly well suited to turn the connections between N=4 SYM theory and QCD into a powerful computational tool, which leads to significant simplifications due to the hidden symmetries underlying integrable systems. Progress in this direction will open new avenues for research and will establish new bridges between the scientific communities in phenomenology and mathematical physics. The new QCD results will be used in the course of the project to explore precision phenomenology at the EIC.

Mots-clés : quantum chromodynamics,deep inelastic scattering,operator product expansion,perturbation theory