Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : XUV-COMB (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1968125.0 €

Discrepancies between theory and experiments have been fuelling the development of physics from the discrete line spectrum of hydrogen, where classical physics fails, to the Lamb shift, which is unexplained by the Dirac equation. At the precision frontier, comparisons between theory and experiment have been performed almost exclusively with atomic hydrogen. To progress from there, it very good accuracy. The spectroscopic investigation of muonic hydrogen, which was successful recently, was the first step in that direction and has brought up a serious challenge to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Even though we could solve this problem in the meantime, there might be others waiting to be discovered when leaving the beaten track of ordinary atomic hydrogen. Besides anti-hydrogen, high resolution laser spectroscopy of singly ionized helium is the next logical item on the list. In addition of representing a hitherto unexplored system, He+ allows for a far better test than atomic hydrogen due to the QED power series expansion of its energy levels in terms of ZWith the nuclear charge Z and the fine structure constant the disputed terms are of the order of (Z)6. Unlike ordinary hydrogen, He+ can be readily stored in an ion trap and sympathetically cooled by co-stored ions with an accessible cooling transition. This approach eliminates essentially all dominating experimental uncertainties that we face with ordinary hydrogen today. The 1S-2S resonance is the sharpest and hence most interesting transition. Its observation requires highly coherent extreme ultraviolet radiation at 60.8 nm which can be generated through high order harmonics from a mode locked laser. The resulting frequency comb is most suitable for a two-photon transition as photons from pairs of modes combine to deliver the excitation energy. Other applications of such new laser source are foreseeable.
Projet ERC : BEHAVE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Delft University of Technology — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998750.0 €

Discrete choice theory provides a mathematically rigorous framework to analyse and predict choice behaviour. While many of the theory’s key developments originate from the domain of transportation (mobility, travel behaviour), it is now widely used throughout the social sciences. The theory has a blind spot for moral choice behaviour. It was designed to analyse situations where people make choices that are optimal given their consumer preferences, rather than situations where people attempt to make choices that are right, given their moral preferences. This neglect of the morality of choice is striking, in light of the fact that many of the most important choices people make, have a moral dimension. This research program extends discrete choice theory to the domain of moral decision making. It will produce a suite of new mathematical representations of choice behaviour (i.e., choice models), which are designed to capture the decision rules and decision weights that determine how individuals behave in moral choice situations. In these models, particular emphasis is given to heterogeneity in moral decision rules and to the role of social influences. Models will be estimated and validated using data obtained through a series of interviews, surveys and choice experiments. Empirical analyses will take place in the context of moral choice situations concerning i) co-operative road using and ii) unsafe driving practices. Estimation results will be used as input for agent based models, to identify how social interaction processes lead to the emergence, persistence or dissolution of moral (traffic) equilibria at larger spatio-temporal scales. Together, these proposed research efforts promise to generate a major breakthrough in discrete choice theory. In addition, the program will result in important methodological contributions to the empirical study of moral decision making behaviour in general; and to new insights into the moral aspects of (travel) behaviour.
Projet ERC : RanDM (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1106719.0 €

Discrete mathematics has seen enormous advances in the last few years, with solutions being found to a number of famous and long-standing questions, such as the Erdos distinct distance problem and the existence conjecture for combinatorial designs. Much of this progress owes to an increased understanding of random and pseudorandom objects. An entire framework, known as the probabilistic method, has grown around the application of randomness to combinatorial problems, while pseudorandomness is playing an increasingly important role. In this proposal, we will consider a range of problems, some stemming from the direct study of random and pseudorandom objects and others arising in areas where randomness and pseudorandomness have proved to be of particular importance. We will be particularly concerned with extensions of the regularity method to sparse graphs and improving bounds for a number of classical problems in graph Ramsey theory. These problems are of a fundamental nature and any progress is likely to lead to new techniques with broader scope for application.
Projet ERC : ULTRADISS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : University of Basel — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1430708.0 €

Dissipation spectroscopy: Nanomechanical dissipation, experienced by oscillating tip-based Force Microscopy (AFM) instruments, provides an innovative probe of the physics of classical and quantum materials, solids, surfaces. My group made, in the last decade, well-recognized experimental and conceptual advances by exploiting and adapting advanced AFM techniques, especially the ultra-sensitive pendulum-AFM, (p-AFM, dissipation sensitivity ~0.1 aW, force sensitivity ~ 10-12N) detecting collective phenomena and phase transitions including structural, electronic, magnetic. This dissipation spectroscopy was applied so far mostly at the equilibrium physics of 3D classical solids. The challenge: I propose to extend nanomechanical dissipation spectroscopy to pick up much weaker effects caused by non-equilibrium perturbations, by nanomanipulations, and by quantum effects in carefully picked case studies. Such as measuring the imperceptible wind force exerted on a noncontact tip by a thermal or electrical current in the surface below, or the minute mechanical cost of creating and dismantling a single spin Kondo state, or a topological surface state. Risks, benefits, relevance: None of this was done before, so despite our experience and good feasibility estimates there is some risk. The benefits however will be substantial. Thermal and electrical migration of defects and impurities is important in materials, and electrical contacts. The dragging, peeling, sensing of 2D systems like graphene nanoribbons and twisted bilayers is hot. And quantum dissipation is pertinent to the limiting factor of quantum information processes. To do all this by nanomechanics will be unique. The opportunity: My group is ready to put its expertise in these exciting new problems, once I can through an Advanced Grant secure the instrumental and experimental human resources, as well as the theoretical support of additional beneficiary SISSA, indispensable in such a frontier context.

Mots-clés : nanoscale energy dissipation,atomic force microscopy,2d systems under non equilibrium conditions,topological materials
Projet ERC : MAPAS (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Universidade de Vigo — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499923.0 €

Diversity is the most important asset of life on Earth. Estimates indicate that there are more than 8 million species providing us food, well-being and health. Since Darwin and Mendel, we started to understand how diversity is selected and inherited. However, where and why biodiversity originates and vanishes are fundamental questions yet to be answered. Today, we are witnessing the 6th mass extinction and thus, to maintain high levels of biodiversity for future generations, we need to protect not only current biodiversity hotspots, but also evolutionary cradles of future biodiversity. Global biodiversity patterns have been studied by biogeographers and palaeontologists aiming to unveil general rules of life. But here, instead of focussing on patterns, I propose to focus on modelling and mapping processes through deep time (e.g. species origination and extinction). MAPAS aims to test the influence of different biotic and abiotic drivers in processes generating biodiversity, and answer theoretical and practical research questions involving where and why species originate, spread and vanish. MAPAS will pioneer the study of deep-time geographic diversification dynamics with an unprecedented time-frame. I plan to produce palaeoclimatic simulations for the entire Phanerozoic (the last 540 million years) and a ground-breaking spatially-explicit mechanistic model to generate the first maps of the geographical distribution of evolutive processes across deep time. The results of this decidedly ambitious project will open new horizons for research, bringing palaeontological, biogeographical and ecological schools together, and will provide important insights for conservation efforts.

Mots-clés : biogeography,paleobiogeography
Projet ERC : Q-Xtreme (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University of Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Univie
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3207371.76 €

Do the laws of quantum physics hold for massive objects of arbitrary size? Q-Xtreme will address this very important question by testing the quantum superposition principle at unprecedented macroscopic scales: we will place a levitated object in two locations at once, separated by a distance comparable to its size. Experimental confirmations of macroscopic quantum superpositions started as early as 1927, using electrons, and have today reached the size of organic molecules containing thousands of atoms. Q-Xtreme will bring macroscopic quantum physics to an entirely new level by preparing macroscopic quantum superpositions of objects containing billions of atoms, pushing current state-of-the-art by at least five orders of magnitude in mass. This goal will be achieved by using a radically new approach: quantum controlling the center-of-mass motion of a levitated nanoparticle (a solid-state object of few hundred nanometers) in ultra-high vacuum by using optical, electrical and magnetic forces. Q-Xtreme requires cutting-edge expertise in photonics, nanotechnology, optoelectronics, and quantum technology, which this Synergy Group uniquely combines. The achievements of Q-Xtreme are only possible by the combined proficiency in both fundamental science and engineering of this Synergy Group. The implications of Q-Xtreme are far-reaching. Testing the quantum superposition principle at unprecedented mass regimes opens the door to experimentally study the interplay of quantum physics and gravity, as well as dark matter and dark energy models. These macroscopic quantum superpositions will also give rise to ultrahigh sensing accuracies, with applications in inertial force sensing, measurements of short-range interactions and gravitational physics.

Mots-clés : levitated nanoparticles,macroscopic quantum superpositions,optomechanics,quantum nanomechanics,quantum superposition principle
Projet ERC : Q-Xtreme (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 7775506.85 €

Do the laws of quantum physics hold for massive objects of arbitrary size? Q-Xtreme will address this very important question by testing the quantum superposition principle at unprecedented macroscopic scales: we will place a levitated object in two locations at once, separated by a distance comparable to its size. Experimental confirmations of macroscopic quantum superpositions started as early as 1927, using electrons, and have today reached the size of organic molecules containing thousands of atoms. Q-Xtreme will bring macroscopic quantum physics to an entirely new level by preparing macroscopic quantum superpositions of objects containing billions of atoms, pushing current state-of-the-art by at least five orders of magnitude in mass. This goal will be achieved by using a radically new approach: quantum controlling the center-of-mass motion of a levitated nanoparticle (a solid-state object of few hundred nanometers) in ultra-high vacuum by using optical, electrical and magnetic forces. Q-Xtreme requires cutting-edge expertise in photonics, nanotechnology, optoelectronics, and quantum technology, which this Synergy Group uniquely combines. The achievements of Q-Xtreme are only possible by the combined proficiency in both fundamental science and engineering of this Synergy Group. The implications of Q-Xtreme are far-reaching. Testing the quantum superposition principle at unprecedented mass regimes opens the door to experimentally study the interplay of quantum physics and gravity, as well as dark matter and dark energy models. These macroscopic quantum superpositions will also give rise to ultrahigh sensing accuracies, with applications in inertial force sensing, measurements of short-range interactions and gravitational physics.

Mots-clés : levitated nanoparticles,macroscopic quantum superpositions,optomechanics,quantum nanomechanics,quantum superposition principle
Projet ERC : INDIVISUAL (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Giessen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : JLU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499686.0 €

Does visual perception vary between people? This question has fascinated philosophers for millennia, but largely evaded empirical vision science. Recent findings show that eye-movements towards complex, everyday scenes are drawn to important objects, like faces, but the attentional ‘pull’ of different objects reliably varies between people. We do not yet understand the causes and perceptual consequences of these individual salience biases. Understanding their basis in the individual brain has the potential to reveal general mechanisms of attentional selection. Uncovering their distribution in the general population is key to evaluate their potential as a biomarker. We propose three sets of experiments to achieve these goals. First, we will use psychophysics, virtual reality and mobile eye tracking to probe which visual features are driving individual salience biases and how they affect task-driven and real-world behaviour. Second, we aim to understand the neural mechanisms of attentional selection. It is unclear how the brain selects peripheral targets based on semantic attributes, which are thought to be processed by foveal pathways. We will exploit individual differences and the latest developments in brain imaging to juxtapose competing hypotheses and test the relation of salience biases to fine-scale functional neuroanatomy and connectivity. Third, we will evaluate the diagnostic potential of salience biases. We will record the gaze of thousands of individuals in a public setting to establish a norm sample of free viewing in the general population and compare observers with autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia to this norm. This project will establish how and why natural gaze behaviour and perception vary between people. It will harness individual differences to uncover the general mechanisms that guide our eyes through the visual world. A norm sample of salience biases will lay the foundation to evaluate their use in clinical and applied settings.

Mots-clés : eye movements,salience,individual differences,attention,visual system,ventral stream,biomarker
Projet ERC : ELEVATE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Copenhagen — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCPH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1427741.0 €

Domesticated crops hardly resemble their wild ancestors, and often trade higher yield in artificially optimized conditions for lower performance in fluctuating environments. Leafcutter ants (genus Atta) provide fascinating parallels with human farmers, harvesting fresh vegetation used as compost to produce domesticated fungal crops that feed massive societies with millions of workers. However, while human agricultural systems are imperiled by rapid global changes, leafcutter ants have managed to grow one type of cultivar from Texas to Argentina, thriving across extreme rainfall and temperature gradients and across diverse climates over millions of years. However, the eco-physiological mechanisms governing this farming resiliency are poorly understood. I propose a new in vitro mapping paradigm to visualize the niche requirements of fungal cultivars. Creating multidimensional landscapes of nutrient availability (e.g. protein, carbohydrates, Na, P) and environmental stress (e.g. temperature, moisture, plant toxins, crop pathogens) I will answer three main questions: 1) What genes and biochemical pathways shape cultivar performance across interacting gradients of nutrition and stress? 2) Do colonies harvest substrates to navigate nutritional contours of cultivar performance maps and avoid production tradeoffs? 3) Do locally adaptive cultivar traits shape the performance of farming societies across regional ecological gradients, and over 60 million years of co-evolutionary crop domestication by farming ants? My cutting-edge approach will deliver transformative advances to the field of eco-physiology, enabling seamless integration between field and laboratory experiments, and providing new ways to visualize evolutionary mechanisms across levels of biological organization from genes to symbiotic partnerships, and from within diverse farming assemblages to across populations spanning entire continents.

Mots-clés : ecological physiology,mutualism,nutritional ecology,social evolution
Projet ERC : BANK-LASH (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2454198.0 €

Driven by public outrage at bank bailouts during the financial crisis, many governments have since then tried to rewrite the rules governing finance. Yet the anger provoked by the bailouts has not subsided. In Europe and in North America, citizen fury against bankers continues to structure battles over financial regulation. It also affects broader perceptions of fairness in the political system and feeds anti-elite populism. Scholars of political economy have chronicled the clashes between states and large banks, and scholars of political behaviour have noted the failings of governments to respond to the will of democratic majorities. No one has explored the feedback loops between policies regulating banks, the public anger towards banking elites, and media discussions of finance. BANK-LASH fills this gap, using a cutting-edge, high-risk research design comprising three work packages to link policy outcomes with public opinion and media coverage. BANK-LASH 1will collect the first cross-nationally comparable data on public attitudes towards finance, including a series of innovative survey experiments that assess how different media frames affect emotions and preferences. BANK-LASH 2 will use supervised machine learning to measure the overall media environment of these countries for the last decade, assessing how much different national media systems discuss finance and how different national media systems frame the discussion of banking regulation. BANK-LASH 3 links the micro-level study of attitudes and macro-level media coverage with episodes of policy intervention in each country in order to determine when democracies have imposed significant new regulation on their banks. By harnessing these different intellectual tools within a single study, BANK-LASH brings together the concerns of political economy, behavioral research and policy studies to untangle the relationship between banks, public policy, and anti-elite sentiment in the wake of the financial crisis.

Mots-clés : political economy,anti elite politics,financial regulation,issue salience,framing effects,banking,business power,lobbying,structural power,populism