Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MAGCOW (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Universität Hamburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UHH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 200000.0 €

On large scales cosmic matter is distributed in a web consistent of clusters, filaments, walls and voids. While the dark-matter skeleton of the cosmic web is closely traced by galaxies and galaxy clusters, the gaseous distribution has never been directly imaged at any wavelength. This situation might change within the next decade, thanks to the new generation of radio instruments that will survey the sky: LOFAR, MWA, ASKAP and the Square Kilometer Array. Non-thermal components, relativistic particles and magnetic fields are thought to have a spatial distribution that is broader than that of thermal baryons. For this reason, the new generation of radio telescopes should might be able to detect the tip of the iceberg from the rarefied intergalactic medium, provided that magnetic fields are sufficiently amplified in these regions. The detectable signal is expected to be weak and complex because of the contribution from radio galaxies and to the presence of diffuse fore- and backgrounds. The developments proposed in this ERC proposal are exactly designed to address this complexity, and turn future radio observations into a unique probe of the growth of magnetic fields and of the acceleration of particles. This will be possible through the theoretical exploration of plasmas in extreme conditions with sophisticated numerical simulations. With these simulations I will be able to predict the specific radio signature for the origin of extragalactic fields. This will enable the community to use radio surveys in a quantitative way and to determine the origin of extragalactic magnetism, a longstanding puzzle connected to many open questions of modern astrophysics. The legacy of this project will be its quantitative representation of non-thermal processes on the largest scales, ultimately going to be fully exploited by the Square Kilometer Array.
Projet ERC : HiCoShiVa (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
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 : 1288750.0 €

One can attach certain complex analytic functions to algebraic varieties defined over the rational numbers, called Zeta functions. They are a vast generalization of Riemann’s zeta function. The Hasse-Weil conjecture predicts that these Zeta functions satisfy a functional equation and admit a meromorphic continuation to the whole complex plane. This follows from the conjectural Langlands program, which aims in particular at proving that Zeta functions of algebraic varieties are products of automorphic L-functions. Automorphic forms belong to the representation theory of reductive groups but certain automorphic forms actually appear in the cohomology of locally symmetric spaces, and in particular the cohomology of automorphic vector bundles over Shimura varieties. This is a bridge towards arithmetic geometry. There has been tremendous activity in this subject and the Hasse-Weil conjecture is known for proper smooth algebraic varieties over totally real number fields with regular Hodge numbers. This covers in particular the case of genus one curves. Nevertheless, lots of basic examples fail to have this regularity property : higher genus curves, Artin motives... The project HiCoShiVa is focused on this irregular situation. On the Shimura Variety side we will have to deal with higher cohomology groups and torsion. The main innovation of the project is to construct p-adic variations of the coherent cohomology. We are able to consider higher coherent cohomology classes, while previous works in this area have been concerned with degree 0 cohomology. The applications will be the construction of automorphic Galois representations, the modularity of irregular motives and new cases of the Hasse-Weil conjecture, and the construction of p-adic L-functions.
Projet ERC : DiverseNile (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999522.5 €

One of the biggest scientific challenges for archaeology is to move away from established concepts of cultural categories such as static views of culture, which are not suitable to describe realities of ancient lives. Significant work on the complex encounters between Egyptian and Nubian groups in the Middle Nile was conducted by recent projects including my ERC-2012-StG AcrossBorders. They introduced the modern approach of ‘cultural entanglement’ to the main urban sites, but left the peripheries unaddressed. Based on recent successful results, it is now timely to investigate the actual cultural diversity of Middle Nile groups focusing on the periphery of the main centres. The project will explore a crucial part of northern Sudan as a case study to reconstruct Bronze Age biographies (c 1650–1200 BCE) beyond the present categories ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Nubian’. The main hypothesis is that cultural diversity becomes archaeologically more visible in the peripheral zones of the central sites. We need to investigate the regional cultural relations within the peripheries in order to catch a more direct cultural footprint than in state built urban centres. Based on the PI’s excellent knowledge of Bronze Age settlements and material culture in the Nile Valley, she will test with new excavations in a cultural borderscape whether it is feasible to disentangle sites from previous classifications. By applying the new concept of ‘Biography of the landscape’ in conjunction with the ‘contact space’ model, she intends to investigate whether degrees of diversity relate to the peripheral location of sites, which may also be influenced by the geographical topography. Beyond the impact for archaeology, the project’s innovative theoretical approach together with a large set of interdisciplinary methods such as neutron activation and isotope analysis offers a long-overdue input to general questions of border studies, which are also essential to understand the role and function of main centers.

Mots-clés : nubia,sudan,middle nile,bronze age,cultural encounters,material culture,entanglement,cultural diversity,settlement archaeology,funerary archaeology,egypt,kerma,frontier
Projet ERC : STARLIGHT (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 812500.0 €

One of the challenges facing science is to understand the chemical origin of DNA damage-induced mutations. Upon exposure to UV light, DNA nucleobases become electronically excited. This process potentially favors mutagenic miscoding of the DNA sequence. The main target of STARLIGHT is to study with unprecedented temporal resolution (few-femtoseconds/attoseconds) the electron dynamics occurring in UV photoexcited biomolecules. I will mainly consider aromatic complexes including DNA nucleobases (and ultimately DNA) with the aim of tracking in real time the electron dynamics preceding structural changes potentially leading to damage. The proposed research is based on a bottom-up approach: it allows one to understand the physical origin of a variety of light-driven processes occurring in more complex biological systems of crucial importance in photochemistry and photobiology, with tremendous prospects in phototherapy. Electron motion in molecules occurs on a temporal scale ranging from few femtoseconds down to attoseconds. Attosecond science is nowadays a well-established field and electron dynamics has been successfully studied in atoms and small molecules. The work recently conducted by the PI has demonstrated that this technology is mature and ready to be applied to more complex systems such as biomolecules. Electron dynamics will be resonantly activated in biomolecules by few-cycle UV pump pulses and subsequently probed by as-XUV pulses or few-fs-UV pulses. Through time-resolved measurements of the molecular photo-fragmentation, gas-phase spectroscopy will be used to elucidate the role of electrons in the photoreactivity of the molecule in a solvent-free environment. With the final goal of steering the electronic motion, circularly polarized UV pulses will be also used to induce electronic currents in cyclic biomolecules. These ring currents can be exploited to generate intense magnetic fields with promising applications in molecular electronics and quantum control.

Mots-clés : attosecond science,ultrafast laser spectroscopy,electron dynamics in biomolecules,dna damage
Projet ERC : srEDM (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Forschungszentrum Jülich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FZJ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1072207.25 €

One of the great mysteries in the natural sciences is the dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. According to our present understanding, the early universe contained the same amount of matter and antimatter. If the universe had behaved symmetrically as it developed, every particle would have been annihilated by one of its antiparticles. We therefore owe our very existence to mechanisms that have led to a world where something that we call matter remains. We propose to study such mechanisms by searching for electric dipole moments (EDMs) of charged hadrons in a new class of precision storage rings. Our project will lay the foundations for a new European flagship research infrastructure. The breaking of the combined charge conjugation and parity symmetries (CP-violation) in the Standard Model is not strong enough to explain the observed excess of matter and further sources of CP-violation must be sought. These sources could manifest themselves in Electric Dipole Moments of elementary particles, which occur when the centroids of positive and negative charges are mutually and permanently displaced. The observation of an electric dipole moment will elucidate the mechanisms which led to the matter that dominates the universe. Although the measurement principle, the time development of the polarization vector subject to a perpendicular electric field, is simple, the smallness of the effect makes this an enormously challenging project. This can only be mastered through the common effort of an international team of accelerator and particle physicists, working closely with engineers. The proponents of this design study and the research environment at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), including the conventional storage ring COSY, provide the optimal basis for one of the most spectacular possibilities in modern science: finding an EDM as a signal for new physics beyond the Standard Model and perhaps explaining the puzzle of our existence.
Projet ERC : UniFlat (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2425898.0 €

One of the great successes of the last-century physics was recognising that many complex and seemingly disparate many-particle systems are fundamentally alike. This allowed the classification of the equilibrium states of matter into universality classes, based on their basic properties such as symmetries and the form of the interparticle interactions. At the heart of this classification is the universal collective behaviour, insensitive to the microscopic details, displayed by systems close to phase transitions. A grand challenge for modern physics is to achieve such a feat for the far richer world of the non-equilibrium collective phenomena. In recent years, theories that posit universal features of far-from-equilibrium many-body dynamics, common to systems as diverse as quantum magnets and the quark-gluon plasma, have been receiving support from experiments on the highly tuneable ultracold atomic gases. Our ambition is to make a leading contribution to this worldwide effort, through a series of coordinated experiments on homogeneous atomic gases in two-dimensional (2D) ‘Flatland’ geometry. Specifically, we will study in parallel three paradigmatic problems – the dynamics of the topological Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, turbulence in driven systems, and the universal spatiotemporal scaling behaviour in isolated quantum systems far from equilibrium. Each of these topics is fascinating and of fundamental importance in its own right, but beyond that we will experimentally establish an emerging picture that coherently connects them.

Mots-clés : phase transition dynamics,berezinskii kosterlitz thouless,kibble zurek,turbulence,universality far from equilibrium
Projet ERC : ABSOLUTESPIN (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2469136.0 €

One of the greatest challenges in exploiting the electron spin for information processing is that it is not a conserved quantity like the electron charge. In addition, spin lifetimes are rather short and correspondingly coherence is quickly lost. This challenge culminates in the coherent manipulation and detection of information from a single spin. Except in a few special systems, so far, single spins cannot be manipulated coherently on the atomic scale, while spin coherence times can only be measured on spin ensembles. A new concept is needed for coherence measurements on arbitrary single spins. Here, the principal investigator (PI) will combine a novel time- and spin-resolved low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with the concept of pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance. With this unique and innovative setup, he will be able to address long-standing problems, such as relaxation and coherence times of arbitrary single spin systems on the atomic scale as well as individual spin interactions with the immediate surroundings. Spin readout will be realized through the detection of the absolute spin polarization in the tunneling current by a superconducting tip based on the Meservey-Tedrow-Fulde effect, which the PI has recently demonstrated for the first time in STM. For the coherent excitation, a specially designed pulsed GHz light source will be implemented. The goal is to better understand the spin dynamics and coherence times of single spin systems as well as the spin interactions involved in the decay mechanisms. This will have direct impact on the feasibility of quantum spin information processing with single spin systems on different decoupling surfaces and their scalability at the atomic level. A successful demonstration will enhance the detection limit of spins by several orders of magnitude and fill important missing links in the understanding of spin dynamics and quantum computing with single spins.

Mots-clés : scanning tunneling microscopy,electron paramagnetic resonance,single spin dynamics,spin,relaxation,spin coherence
Projet ERC : highECS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Stockholm University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998653.75 €

One of the greatest recent advances in climate science is that it is now beyond reasonable doubt that human activity is warming the Earth. The next natural question is by how much the Earth will warm for a given emission – a quantity that will be essential to regulating global warming. Yet, the likely range of 1.5-4.5 K for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) for a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration has not been reduced for decades. In particular the risk of ECS being high is concerning, but also represents a scientifically intriguing challenge. In this project I will conduct unconventional and innovative research designed to limit the upper bound of ECS: I will confront leading hypotheses of extreme cloud feedbacks – the primary potential source of a high ECS – with observations from the full instrumental- and satellite records, and proxies from warm- and cold past climates. I will investigate how ocean- and atmospheric circulations impact cloud feedbacks, and seek the limits for how much past greenhouse warming could have been masked by aerosol cooling. The highECS project builds on my developments of climate modeling, diagnostics and statistical methods, the strengths of the host institution and developments in national and international projects. The effort is timely in that the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has identified uncertainty in ECS as one of the grand challenges of climate science, while the capacity to observe ongoing climate change, key cloud processes, extracting new proxy evidence of past change and computing power is greater than ever before. If successful in my objective of reining in the upper bound on climate sensitivity this will be a major breakthrough upon a nearly 40-year scientific deadlock and reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change – if not, it will indicate that extreme policy measures may be needed to curb future global warming. Either way, the economic value of knowing is tremendous.
Projet ERC : NANO-3D-LION (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2255055.0 €

One of the greatest technological challenges of today is efficient storage of electrical energy for portable applications, including electric vehicles, mobile electronic devices, and robotic systems. Further progress in these areas, however, is often hindered by the limitations of current rechargeable lithium ion battery technologies, which are among the most common power sources for these systems. Despite tremendous progress in electrode materials, the intrinsic drawbacks of current batteries are related to their planar two-dimensional design, which restrains the performance in terms of output power and charging speed. NANO-3D-LION is aimed to make a breakthrough in these major battery characteristics by a paradigm shift in battery engineering: the goal is to develop and employ advanced nanoscale 3D printing techniques to fabricate active battery materials with ultrasmall structural features, which will provide almost a thousand-fold increase in the surface area of the battery enabled by nanoscale spacing between its electrodes without compromising the battery capacity. To reach this, high-aspect ratio metal features will be fabricated and further converted into the active material of the cathode and the anode. This will enable unprecedented level of control of the battery architecture, allowing groundbreaking improvement of the key battery performance characteristics, including higher output power and charging times of only several seconds. NANO-3D-LION will establish a unique engineering approach with a potential to completely change the future landscape in research and industry related to portable electronic devices and electric vehicles and will also benefit many technologies beyond battery research, where nanoscale 3D printing opens new unparalleled capacity, therefore ensuring its broad scientific, economical and societal impact.

Mots-clés : additive manufacturing,nanoscale printing,lithium ion battery
Projet ERC : BehaEvoDevo (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
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 : 1632647.0 €

One of the holy grails of neuroscience is to understand how complex behaviours arise. However, surprisingly little is known about how behaviours evolve. My proposal will delve into Behavioural Evolution and Development (BehaEvoDevo) in an unbiased and comprehensive way using the insect visual system as a model. The visual system of Drosophila has been described extensively in terms of cell type composition, development, circuitry, and behaviour. My expertise in this system will be the springboard to address four fundamental questions: 1) How different is the cell type composition in the brains of different animals? 2) How do the mechanisms that are responsible for neuronal development evolve and how do they affect neuronal diversity? 3) What are the differences in the circuitry that underlies specific behaviours in different animals? 4) How do differences in neuronal composition, neuronal features, or circuitry drive different behaviours? I will combine cutting edge techniques, such as single-cell sequencing, with advanced genetic tools in Drosophila, and adapt innovative tools for genetic manipulation and circuit function in different non-model insects. I will compare how cell type composition, neuronal specification and differentiation, as well as circuitry, affect specific behaviours. I will examine phylogenetically diverse insects to generate a deep understanding of the mechanisms that are most important for the evolution of different behaviours. Moreover, I will identify fundamental principles about how developmental processes, such as neuronal specification and differentiation, evolve to control different behaviours. The cumulative results of this proposal will offer the first comprehensive assessment of the mechanisms that drive evolution of new behaviours across insects; it will also generate a blueprint for the community to compare their data in different clades of the phylogenetic tree as well as to different sensory modalities.

Mots-clés : evolution of behaviour,evo devo,neurodevelopment,single cell sequencing,comparative transcriptomics,drosophila,neuronal specification and differentiation,cell type evolution,neuronal diversity