Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PICKLE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1596500.0 €

The knowledge of interiors of rocky planets of our solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) is important for understanding their formation, present state, and evolution. The comprehension of differences and similarities in the internal constitution and processes will shed a new light on the origin and evolution of the solar system. Space missions are invaluable to this planetary quest. Yet, only geodesy data so far provided constraints on planetary deep interiors. Seismic observations on planetary bodies other than Earth are limited to the Apollo records for the Moon. The main objective of the forthcoming InSight mission is to place a seismometer on Mars to study its interior. However, the interpretation and full exploitation of geodesy and seismic data to produce accurate models of planetary structure and dynamics (internal convection and magnetic field generation) is critically hampered by the dearth of knowledge of key physical parameters of pertinent materials at relevant pressures (P) and temperatures (T). Thus this proposal aims at developing techniques and methodologies, combining innovative laboratory and synchrotron measurements, to acquire such physical properties at high pressure and temperature. I propose to measure sound velocities and acoustic attenuation of minerals and aggregates forming the mantle of telluric planets, as well as the phase diagram and melting curves of iron alloys forming their core. I will implement novel approaches to provide unprecedented determination of thermo-elastic properties of liquid iron alloys at P-T conditions directly relevant to the core of Mercury and Mars. Such information will be integrated together with geophysical data to infer new planetary models. This interdisciplinary project will contribute to understand the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system, addressing fundamental questions related to their past and present dynamics.

Mots-clés : planetary interiors,terrestrial planets,physical properties,planetary models,high pressure,high temperature,laboratory measurements,synchrotron measurements,diamond anvil cells
Projet ERC : ICEBERG (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Université Catholique de Louvain — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 382250.0 €

The large-scale integration of renewable resources in electric power systems requires the mobilization of flexible consumers who can adapt their consumption to the variable and uncertain fluctuation of renewable supply. The mobilization of demand-side flexibility remains an elusive goal in electric power systems, while the majority of flexible consumers are connected to distribution systems that are currently operated passively. The major obstacles towards the optimal management of demand-side flexibility include the enormous number of flexible consumers (with ensuing challenges for scalable optimization), the presence of uncertainty at all layers of the power grid, and the physical complexity of distribution system power flow. In this context, the ICEBERG project proposes a novel approach towards the proactive utilization of transmission and distribution system resources in a coordinated fashion. My approach to achieving this ambitious goal is based on three key ingredients. (i) The first ingredient is a novel approach for planning and simulating the dispatch of the system which exploits the structure of distribution networks and can scale to systems of arbitrary size. (ii) The second ingredient is an original optimization framework for tackling uncertainty and non-convexity at every layer of the system. (iii) The third ingredient is a novel implementation of this optimization framework in parallel and distributed computing infrastructure, which will enable the optimal short-term planning and real-time coordination of resources at all layers of the system. My vision is to break down the current barriers to renewable energy integration by mobilizing the as yet untapped flexibility that is present at all layers of the network. This will enable the achieving of ambitious sustainability targets with acceptable infrastructure upgrades and without any deterioration in the quality of electric power service, which consumers currently enjoy.

Mots-clés : acmcss2012  stochastic control and optimization,acmcss2012  operations research,decision analysis
Projet ERC : FutureLSS (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Portsmouth — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

The last 30 years have been a golden era of cosmological discoveries, which revolutionized our understanding of the physical concepts, which govern our Universe. New discoveries indicate that the beginning of our Universe might have been dominated by the inflaton field, which decayed during the first second of the Universe’s existence, introducing tiny ripples in the matter distribution, which ultimately sourced later galaxy formation. The future of our Universe is dominated by dark energy, which causes the current Universe to accelerate in its expansion. Both inflation and dark energy are theoretical constructs, which help to explain current observational results, but their fundamental role in physics is not yet understood. The distribution of galaxies in the Universe encodes an enormous amount of information, which holds the key to unravel new fundamental concepts of nature. The main goal of this proposal is to use galaxy surveys to uncover convincing evidence for the inflationary scenario and to reveal clues that will help to determine the nature of dark energy. My team will make use of data from the DESI and Euclid experiments, a new generation of galaxy surveys, which will provide datasets more than an order of magnitude larger than what is available today, thus allowing a decisive step forward with an exciting discovery potential. Such measurements will face significant challenges in systematics control, non-linear modeling, and computational limitations. In this proposal, I will outline my plan to develop new statistical estimators, apply cutting-edge modeling techniques, and access new observables to constrain cosmological models. This project will produce results going beyond cosmology, impacting particle- as well as high energy physics. With DESI starting in late 2019 and Euclid in 2021 this work is timely and my experience in the clustering analysis with such datasets puts me in a unique position to lead the cosmological exploitation of these experiments.
Projet ERC : LOCFRONT (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : KTH Royal Institute of Technology — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KTH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1815978.0 €

The last decade has seen impressive progress in the control and understanding of closed many-body quantum systems, propelled by the drive towards quantum technology. This progress, especially in understanding nonequilibrium many-body quantum dynamics, is now severely hampered by the limited toolbox available for studying such systems. This is especially true in systems far from their absolute zero temperature ground states and where disorder or imperfections play a crucial role. Such systems are at the core of some of the most fundamental open questions in quantum physics, including how and when such systems become thermal and behave according to classical expectations, and when they do not. The many-body localization transition is a poorly understood, unconventional dynamic phase transition that is believed to prevent many-body quantum systems form thermalizing. The underlying mechanism for this transition is localization of particles due to quantum interference induced by scattering of imperfections. As a result of the localization, quantum information that otherwise would become inaccessible due to thermalization, can in principle be retained indefinitely. The major objective of this project is to significantly enhance and enlarge the toolbox for study of quantum-many body dynamics and localization physics in general, and by applying the new tools address open fundamental questions about quantum physics. The problem is hard, and most approaches to new tools are at the outset likely to fail. The project therefore takes a multipronged approach by developing several new methods in addition to improving and applying old ones in new directions. This includes conceptually new approaches to localization (the localization landscape), inspired by recent advances in mathematics, which will be broadly applicable to localization physics in general. This broad applicability will be demonstrated by also applying it to the physics of amorphous topological matter.

Mots-clés : many body localization,quantum thermalisation,computer simulations,density matrix quantum dynamics,localization landscape,amorphous topological insulators
Projet ERC : COPMAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1071635.05 €

The last decades have witnessed major progress in our understanding of the basic physics of soft matter materials. At the same time, microfluidics has also undergone spectacular theoretical and experimental progress. The confluence of such major advances spawns unprecedented opportunities for the design and manufacturing of new soft mesoscale materials, with promising applications in tissue engineering, photonics, catalysis and many others. COPMAT is targeted at making the most this opportunity through the pursuit of a single general goal: the full-scale simulation at nanometric resolution of micro-reactors for the design and synthesis of new tunable porous materials. In particular, we shall focus on the microfluidic design of: multi-jel materials, trabecular porous media and soft mesoscale molecules. We shall also explore new designs concepts based on unexplored microscale phenomena, such as the interaction between plasticity and nano-rugosity. The complex interplay between the highly non-linear rheology of soft materials and the major experimental control parameters leads to an engineering design of formidable complexity, characterized by a strong sensitivity of the macroscale material properties on the details of nanoscale interfacial interactions. COPMAT will tackle this formidable multiscale challenge through the deployment of an entirely new family of multiscale techniques, centered upon highly innovative extensions of the Lattice Boltzmann method and its combinations with Immersed Boundary Method, Dissipative Particle Dynamics and Dissipative Voronoi Dynamics. The success of COPMAT will be gauged by its capability of inspiring and realizing the design of microfluidic devices for the synthesis of novel families of porous materials for bio-engineering applications. The new paradigm established by COPMAT for the computational design of soft materials is expected to extend well beyond the time-horizon of the project.
Projet ERC : BuildingPlanS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Leicester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1945720.96 €

The last few years have seen an explosion in our knowledge of extra-solar planetary systems. However, most exoplanetary systems look nothing like our own: we see “hot Jupiters” which take just days to orbit their parent stars, planets which meander across entire solar systems on highly eccentric orbits, and even planets orbiting twin, binary suns. These planets formed in relatively homogenous discs of cold dust and gas around young, newly-formed stars, but we do not yet understand how this extraordinarily diverse range of planetary architectures was assembled. BuildingPlanS will establish how the observed architectures of exoplanets link to the physics of their formation. My team will build comprehensive models of the assembly of planetary systems, in order to: 1) understand how systems of giant planets are built. 2) understand the assembly of compact, tightly-packed planetary systems. 3) determine where and when planets form around binary stars. By focusing on the three main types of known planetary systems we will determine how key physical processes operate in a wide variety of different environments, and build up a detailed understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve. Recently I have played a key role in developing a robust theory of how young, gas-rich protoplanetary discs evolve; this project will establish how these new ideas shape the formation and evolution of planetary systems. My team will consider how forming and newly-formed planets interact with their parent discs, in order to understand the architectures of young planetary systems. We will then follow how these young systems evolve to maturity over billions of years, and test our results against both new observations of planet-forming discs and our ever-growing census of exoplanetary systems. The overall aim of BuildingPlanS is to link exoplanet architectures with their formation and establish a global picture of how planetary systems are built.
Projet ERC : MONIFAULTS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Padua — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIPD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 32629.56 €

The last seismic sequence in Italy, responsible for 298 fatalities and important economic loss, remind us how urgent it is to improve our knowledge about earthquake physics to advance earthquake forecasting. While direct observations during laboratory earthquakes permit us to derive exhaustive physical models describing the behaviour of rocks and to forecast incoming lab-earthquakes, the complex physics governing the nucleation of earthquakes remain poorly understood in real Earth, and so does our ability to forecast earthquakes. I posit that this ‘ignorance’ emerges from our limited ability to unravel information about fault physics from geophysical data.The objective of this proposal is to introduce a new and integrated methodology to monitor the spatiotemporal evolution of elastic properties on real faults using seismological and geodetic data. We will apply machine learning and covariance matrix factorization for improved earthquake detection, and to discover ‘anomalous’ seismological signals, which will reveal unknown physical processes on faults. These novel observations will be integrated with time dependent measurements of rheology and deformation, obtained from cutting-edge techniques applied to continuous seismological and geodetic data. Our integrated monitoring approach will be applied to study how faults respond to known stress perturbations (as Earth tides). In parallel, we will analyse periods preceding significant earthquakes to assess how elastic properties and deformation evolve while a fault is approaching a critical (near rupture) state. Our natural laboratory will be Italy, given its excellent geodetic and seismological instrumentation, deep knowledge about faults geometry and the relevant risk posed by earthquakes. Our research will provide new insights about the complex physics of faults at critical state, necessary to understand how real earthquakes nucleate. This project will also have a major impact on observational earthquake forecast.

Mots-clés : earthquakes forecasting
Projet ERC : MeloVDU (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University of Manchester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149250.0 €

The last twenty years has seen a huge improvement in the quality of images produced by commercial visual display units. Nevertheless, they still do not fully recreate the range of sensations we experience during natural vision. We have designed a prototype visual display that will allow us to take advantage of recent developments in visual neurophysiology to address that limitation. We request funds to construct this prototype and explore its performance as a necessary proof of concept for its commercialisation.

Mots-clés : visual display unit,colour,melanopsin,vision
Projet ERC : PACT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998375.0 €

The last two decades have seen the rise of populist movements and parties in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Over the same period, conspiracy theories have also significantly gained in visibility and impact. As any casual observer of contemporary politics knows, the two phenomena are connected. Populist leaders often use conspiracist rhetoric, and many of their followers are receptive to it. Previous research has highlighted parallels between the two phenomena (such as Manicheanism and simplification) but left important questions unanswered. When, how, why, and to what effects do populists articulate conspiracy theories? Are they more prominent on the right than on the left? Does their significance change when parties move from the opposition into power? How do populist movements deal with the fact that some of their members believe in conspiracy theories, but others do not? To answer these and related questions, this interdisciplinary project will analyze the role of conspiracy theories for currently successful populist movements in the United States, Brazil, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. Paying close attention to national, media, and other contexts, it will examine the significance of conspiracy theories for party leaders as well as for ordinary members. Methodologically, the project will combine Critical Discourse Analysis (of speeches, party manifestos, social media etc.) with ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation and semi-structured interviews) to provide a holistic and comprehensive account. Conceptually, the project will combine the ideational and discursive-stylistic approaches to populism. A similar investigation has never been undertaken. The project’s results have potential implications beyond the academic realm. They will not solve the problems that populism and conspiracy theory pose. But there is a fair chance that they will help to meet better the challenges that they currently pose to liberal representational democracy.

Mots-clés : populism,conspiracy theory,communication,social media,democracy,collective identity,othering
Projet ERC : EXOTIC (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2269197.0 €

The least understood part of the so successful Standard Model of the strong and electroweak forces is the formation of strongly interacting composites, like hadrons, atomic nuclei and hypernuclei. In addition, the nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in stars is fine-tuned at various places, which immediately leads to the question how much these fine-tunings can be offset to still lead to an habitable universe? Over the last decade, the PI and his collaborators have further improved the chiral effective field theory for two- and three-nucleon forces, have pioneered and refined the extension of this approach to baryon-baryon interactions and, most importantly, have developed nuclear lattice effective field theory, which enabled them to solve longstanding problems in nuclear physics, like the ab initio calculation of the Hoyle state in 12C. Based on these achievements, this proposal will provide answers to: i) where are the limits of nuclear stability? ii) what hypernuclei can exist, what are their properties and how is the equation of state of neutron matter modied by the presence of strange quarks? and iii) what limits on the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model are set by the fine-tunings in nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in stars? Apart from answering these big science questions, the proposal will, as a by-product, develop methods in effective field theories and Monte Carlo simulations that will be of use in other fields, such as cold atom and condensed matter physics.

Mots-clés : nuclear stability,hypernuclei,fine tunings in element generation,chiral effective field theory,nuclear lattice effective field theory,monte carlo simulations
Projet ERC : PSYCHOCELL (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Universität Hamburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UHH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The long-lasting burden of major neuropsychiatric disorders results from disruption of cognitive performance in daily life. Impairment of long-range coupling between prefrontal cortex and hippocampus represents the substrate of disease-specific mnemonic and executive deficits. While it has been hypothesized that this impairment emerges long before the first clinical symptoms, technical and ethical limitations of non-invasive investigations in high-risk infants precluded the elucidation of ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology of disease. In previous studies, I pioneered the investigation of long-range coupling in the immature brain by developing a multidisciplinary approach that combines electro- and optophysiology in vivo with behavior, anatomy and analysis of network dynamics. Using mouse models of disease’s etiology, we recently identified the de-coupling of prefrontal-hippocampal networks during early development as potential mechanism underlying adult circuit dysfunction. These findings represent the basis for the current proposal, which aims at understanding the cellular mechanisms accounting for abnormal network maturation in neuropsychiatric disorders. First, the role of excitation/inhibition imbalance in the neonatal prefrontal cortex for disease-specific network impairment will be assessed. Second, the synaptic organization and wiring deficits within neonatal prefrontal-hippocampal networks will be monitored. Third, the cellular substrate of abnormal hippocampal activity causing weaker prefrontal-hippocampal interactions will be ascertained. Finally, the identified cellular elements underlying early network dysfunction will be selectively manipulated to rescue the juvenile circuit function and behavioral performance. Understanding the mechanisms of network dysfunction during early development may open new therapeutic perspectives that, when initiated before the onset of clinical symptoms, may improve the devastating outcome of disease.

Mots-clés : neuronal networks,cognition,optogenetics,oscillations