Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : HiggsSelfCoupling (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

The Standard Model of particle physics describes the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions. In 2012, its last ingredient, the Higgs boson, was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The exploration of the Higgs boson is now one of the most exciting avenues to explore for New Physics beyond the Standard Model and allows some of the most pressing problems in theoretical physics to be addressed, such as the origins of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. This important mechanism gives elementary particles their masses but the nature of this mechanism remains a mystery. A particularly crucial measurement is the production cross-section of Higgs boson pairs, which provides unique information on the Higgs self-coupling and on the underlying nature of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. Most feasibility studies of the Higgs self-coupling conclude that there will be insufficient data for this measurement in the coming decade. However, my recent feasibility studies indicate that by using the Higgs pair production process with four bottom quarks in the final state, the discovery of the di-Higgs process and its cross section measurement can be made much earlier. This project aims to develop and complete the first measurement of the di-Higgs cross section and most stringent bounds on the Higgs self-coupling before 2023. To achieve this goal I will develop new experimental techniques to improve the background reduction rates and enhance the signal. The objectives are the development of novel bottom quark energy reconstruction algorithms, new bottom quark and Higgs identification techniques, and neural network analysis tools. Analysis of ATLAS data will then enable searches for New Physics and ultimately the di-Higgs cross section measurement to constrain the Higgs self-coupling. This landmark measurement will lead to the confirmation of how particles acquire mass and open new avenues to understand what lies beyond the Standard Model.

Mots-clés : di higgs pair production,higgs self coupling,jet reconstruction and calibration,sub structure techniques,boosted and resolved topologies,b quark and higgs identification,mva techniques
Projet ERC : NuBSM (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Copenhagen — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UCPH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 580340.0 €

The Standard Model of particle physics is a hugely successful theory that has been tested in experiments at ever increasing energies, culminating in the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Nevertheless, some major riddles cannot be addressed by the Standard Model, such as neutrino oscillations, the existence of Dark Matter, the absence of antimatter in the Universe. New fundamental principles, interactions and unknown yet particles are required to address these questions. Much of the research done during the last three decades on physics ‘beyond the Standard Model’ (BSM) has been driven by attempts to find a ‘natural’ solution of the hierarchy problem: why the Planck and the electroweak scales are so different. The most popular approaches to this problem predict new particles with the masses right above the electroweak scale. This project explores an alternative idea that the absence of new particles with masses between the electroweak and Planck scales, supplemented by extra symmetries (such as scale invariance) may itself explain why the mass of the Higgs boson is much smaller than the Planck mass. This calls for a solution of the BSM problems by extremely feebly interacting particles with masses below the electroweak scale. Along the same lines we also explore the possibility that cosmological inflation does not require a new field, but is driven by the Higgs field of the Standard Model. The proposed model offers solutions for BSM puzzles and is among a few ones that can be tested with existing experimental technologies and are valid even if no evidence for new physics is found at the LHC. Constructing such a theory requires consolidated efforts in domains of high-energy theory, particle physics phenomenology, physics of the early Universe, cosmology and astrophysics as well as analyses of the available data from previous experiments and from cosmology. We will make predictions and establish the sensitivity goals for future high intensity experiments.

Mots-clés : physics of the early universe,higgs inflation,baryon asymmetry,sterile neutrino dark matter
Projet ERC : PRECISION (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : TU Dortmund University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498248.75 €

The Standard Model of particle physics successfully describes all known particles and their interactions. However, questions like the nature of dark matter or the hierarchy of masses and couplings of quarks and leptons remain to be understood. Hence, one searches for new phenomena that will lead to a superior theory that can explain these questions. All such theories introduce additional quantum corrections. Decay rates of processes which are strongly suppressed in the Standard Model are highly sensitive to these corrections. The LHCb experiment at CERN has recorded the world’s largest sample of beauty mesons. In the five years of this proposal, this sample will be enlarged by more than a factor of five. This sets an optimal environment for precision tests for new phenomena in strongly suppressed beauty decays. This proposal aims to discover new scalar or vector particles in precision measurements of leptonic and semi-leptonic beauty decays. These new particles are not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, a potential discovery would mark the most important finding in High Energy Physics of the last decades. Some existing anomalies in flavour data can be interpreted as hints for the particles searched for in this proposal. Two classes of measurements are planned within this proposal: the complete scan of purely leptonic beauty decays which include flavour changing neutral current as well as lepton flavour violating modes. Lepton flavour universality is tested in loop decays through a novel inclusive strategy. All proposed measurements will advance the world’s knowledge significantly and have a large discovery potential.

Mots-clés : flavour physics,lepton flavour
Projet ERC : TOROS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499813.0 €

The TOROS project targets the challenge of implementing safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPSs) on commodity multicore processors such that their temporal correctness can be certified in a formal, trustworthy manner. While today it is in principle possible to construct a CPS in a temporally sound way, in practice this rarely happens because, with the current real-time foundations, the prerequisite investments in time, expertise, and resources are prohibitive. This situation is caused in large parts by three fundamental shortcomings in the design of state-of-the-art real-time operating systems (RTOSs) and the applicable timing analyses: (i) current RTOSs expose primarily low-level mechanisms that suffer from accidental unpredictability, i.e., mechanisms that require too much expertise to be used and composed in a temporally sound way; (ii) most analyses rely on idealized worst-case execution-time assumptions that realistically cannot be satisfied on commodity multicore platforms; and (iii) the available real-time theory depends on often complex and tedious proofs, and cannot always be trusted to be sound. As a result, formal timing analysis is rarely relied upon in the certification of CPSs in reality, and instead the use of ad-hoc, unsound "safety margins" prevails. The TOROS project seeks to close this gap by moving the RTOS closer to analysis, the analysis closer to reality, and by ensuring that the analysis can be trusted. Specifically, the TOROS project will 1. introduce a radically new, theory-oriented RTOS that by design ensures that the temporal behavior of any workload can be analyzed (even if the application developer is unaware of the relevant theory), 2. develop a matching novel timing analysis that allows for below-worst-case provisioning with analytically sound safety margins that yields meaningful probabilistic response-time guarantees, and 3. mechanize and verify all supporting timing analysis with the Coq proof assistant.
Projet ERC : DIVLAW (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Zurich — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UZH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

The Torah’s notion of divine law fundamentally transforms the nature of law found in its ancient Near Eastern context. Typically kings—not gods—took on the role of the promulgation of laws. The Torah’s conception of God as lawgiver emerged gradually through historical processes, rather than constituting the bedrock of the Bible’s literary and legal history. And, while scholars have long recognized the uniqueness of the Torah’s conception, its early historical development has received little attention. Only tangential analysis exists on the forces surrounding the genesis of the Torah’s notion of divine laws within ancient Near Eastern legal history or its impact on religion and politics in the early historical contexts of ancient Israel and Judah. This project therefore aims: 1) to explicate the anchoring of law in the religious ether of the Ancient Near East; 2) to elucidate for the first time the intellectual processes in ancient Israel and Judah that led to the notion of divine laws and God as lawgiver, drawing comparisons with other legal understandings and practices from the ancient Near East; 3) to assess the socio-political and religious impact of this notion with ancient Judaism through the Hellenistic Period; and 4) to contextualize this development in the ancient world in comparison to parallel developments in Greek polities. The project’s innovative potential lies in: 1) the evaluation of the divine laws as a historical phenomenon; 2) the neglected effort to understand their intellectual genesis and early development in a reciprocal relation to their socio-political context; 3) the cross-cultural analysis of ancient Israel and Judah and its neighbouring cultures in this regard; and 4) the application of a longue durée and realgeschichtliche perspective to largely literary and philological disciplines. These investigations offer a new paradigm for elucidating the webs connecting divinity, law, and socio-political developments in the first millennium BCE.

Mots-clés : tora,legal history,divine law
Projet ERC : Fornax (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : National Institute for Astrophysics — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : INAF
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

The Universe around us is populated with galaxies, each containing from millions to tens of billions of individual stars. Far from being immutable, galaxies undergo profound changes as they age. Their evolution depends on their position in the cosmic web, a network of sheets and filaments of matter that stretches across the entire Universe. The goal of FORNAX is to study the evolution of galaxies in the densest regions of the cosmic web, galaxy clusters. In these regions, a number of physical processes are thought to make galaxies lose their cold gas – the material from which new stars are born – and change their appearance dramatically. I will study these processes in action by observing the flow of cold gas in and out of galaxies living inside an important, nearby cluster of galaxies: Fornax. I will observe Fornax for 2,450 hours with MeerKAT, a new, state-of-the-art radio telescope precursor of the Square Kilometre Array. Thanks to the unprecedented combination of sensitivity, resolution and sky-coverage of my survey, I will reveal the most subtle signs of the removal of gas from galaxies, I will detect the smallest gas-bearing galaxies in the cluster, and I will hunt the elusive cold gas which, according to cosmological theories, floats in the space between galaxies along the filaments of the cosmic web.
Projet ERC : VIDEO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Forschungszentrum Jülich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FZJ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The VIDEO project will professionalize and integrate software and develop open standard file formats for electron microscopy based on results from the ERC Advanced Grant project IMAGINE, supplemented with results and support from other research groups and hardware vendors. Our goal is to combine these separate activities into an open software platform and to develop open standards, which will enable vendors and users to develop interoperable solutions in this area, and to explore business and sustainability models. Over the last 20 years, electron microscopy has developed from a technique that provides magnified images to become a complex ultra-high resolution analytical tool. Data sets are no longer single qualitative images, but collections of quantitative multi-channel signals. This new approach to using an electron microscope makes developing software to control the experiments and to process the resulting data an integral part of creating and improving electron microscopy techniques. Recently, pixelated detectors have been developed for scanning transmission electron microscopy. For the first time, they allow efficient capture of complete frames of scattered intensity for each scanned pixel. We have been using such novel pixelated detectors to measure nanoscale electromagnetic fields as part of the underlying ERC Advanced Grant IMAGINE. However, software support for these detectors is still in its infancy, with image capture and very basic analysis capabilities provided by the detector vendors and experimental one-off data analysis scripts developed by users. The goal of the VIDEO project is to combine these efforts by creating full software support for pixelated STEM and finding a business model to sustain this open platform as a powerful starting point for an open, interoperable and standardized software platform for electron microscopy.

Mots-clés : software,file formats,electron microscopy,stem,pixelated stem,open science,open innovation,collaborative development,open source
Projet ERC : Modu-Spectro (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Lund University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 31250.0 €

The ability to analyse compounds within turbid/scattering liquids is very important in fields related to Environmental monitoring, Medical analysis, Pharmaceutical testing and Food processing. However, for turbid liquids that include dirty water, blood, milk as well as unfiltered beer, wine, oils etc, unwanted multiple scattering effects occur, preventing any measurement or introducing large errors. Thus, current commercially available spectrophotometers are not capable of measuring within such liquids and time-consuming dilution procedures are required (when possible), ultimately modifying the properties of the probed liquid. In this proposal, we will explore the possibility of commercializing a new spectrophotometer where unwanted effects from multiple light scattering are efficiently suppressed. The instrument prototype used here is called Modu and is based on a new technology developed by the PI and his teams during the “Spray-Imaging” ERC-Starting Grant project. This technology is based on the use of a spatially modulated polychromatic light sheet (PCT pending) imaged from the side. This approach differs significantly from the transmission measurement commonly used in spectrophotometry. From some initial testing, it is found that the suggested technique provides fast, yet more accurate and reliable, characterization of turbid liquids, without the need for dilution. The proposed technology offers, then, a new solution to a variety of industrial problems including concentration measurements in turbid water and pharmaceuticals without any calibration; as well as assessing the colour and haze of unfiltered beverages such as beer, while keeping the sample intact. Thus, the technology and optical instrument proposed here is opening doors for a vast variety new measurement possibilities, including inline monitoring of turbid liquids.

Mots-clés : absorption spectroscopy,scattering,turbid media,concentration measurements in liquids
Projet ERC : START (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Birmingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1466014.0 €

The ability to consciously recognise faces, objects, or sounds is crucial for adaptive behaviour and survival. Yet, how our conscious experience of the world emerges in our brain remains unknown. The overall aim of the START programme is to fill an important gap in our understanding of consciousness by elucidating the neural underpinnings of conscious access. How does the brain select relevant information among distractors, and keep this information in mind? Why does our ability to consciously recognise salient objects sometimes fail under pressure and exhibit variability across days and individuals? Current theories of conscious access thus far rely on EEG recordings or fMRI measurements, which in isolation offer limited insights into the precise neural dynamics of conscious access. A further shortcoming of current models is their limited explanations for inter-trial and inter-individual variations in conscious access thresholds. START will tackle these challenges using attentional blink tasks involving the perception and recollection of visual objects. First, it will precisely track where in the brain and when in time the representations critical for conscious access are established, by using a novel approach which combines the strengths of EEG, fMRI, and Deep Convolutional Neuronal Networks. Second, START will reveal how activity patterns are amplified by the brain and encoded in working memory using multivariate pattern analyses of EEG data and novel experimental designs. Finally, START will carefully model variability in task performance across trials and participants using a new approach of representational sampling. In summary, START will provide new insights on the precise spatio-temporal dynamics of conscious access, the mechanisms governing it, and the idiosyncratic subtleties behind the meanderings of consciousness. This has deep implications for our understandings of brain health and disease, especially in clinical cases where consciousness is impaired.

Mots-clés : object vision,attentional blink,electroencephalography,functional magnetic resonance imaging,multivariate pattern analyses,representational similarity analysis
Projet ERC : AQE2D (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
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 : 2139400.0 €

The ability to create and control connected quantum states established the advent of quantum information technologies (Q-IT). Manipulation of the electron spin associated with colour centres in solid state crystals is one of the pillar technologies that could eventually push Q-IT beyond cryogenic environments. Exploitation of the full potential of these atomic qubit systems is, however, hampered by two key challenges: the lack of atomistic insights into their properties, and the ability to place them with the required fidelity and atomic spatial precision. Here I propose to converge recent breakthrough developments in the synthetic control of two-dimensional (2D) materials and ultra-fast, single-atom resolving probes to overcome these challenges. Specifically, I will develop a platform for electro-optically addressable spin qubits (Atomic Quantum Emitters, AQEs) in 2D materials based on atomic dopants in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers and molecular spin systems in 2D covalent organic frameworks (2D-COFs). These systems will provide an ideal platform to generate AQEs by chemical design, to control the mesoscopic environment averting variability between emitters, to achieve atomically precise spatial placement, to identify and eliminate decoherence channels, and to develop high-fidelity scalable pumping schemes. The proposed construction of a spin-polarized ultrafast THz scanning probe microscope with optical detection capabilities will enable the direct correlation of structural, electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of individual AQEs with simultaneous atomic spatial resolution and picosecond time resolution. This will open new frontiers in the spatio-temporal characterization and control of solid-state AQE systems. The atomically precise engineering of 2D quantum materials and unprecedented microscopic insights into AQEs bear transformative potential for the field of quantum sensing, communication and information processing.

Mots-clés : engineered artificial atom states,low dimensional quantum materials,ultra fast scanning probe microscopy,pump probe thz spectroscopy,atomic precision technologies