Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DeColSharia (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Erfurt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2554891.0 €

European colonialism’s encounter with Islamic law or Sharia, the main pillar of the pre-colonial legal systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has had a tremendous impact until today. The implementation of modern European-style legal systems has led, as some scholars claim, to the abolishment of Sharia. Others consider the legal changes through which Muslim societies have transited as a sign of Sharia’s flexibility rather than its demise. The principal question this project addresses is: How was Sharia transformed by colonialism? The question mark in the project title “(De)Colonizing Sharia?” allows us to deliberately leave open the extent of the continuities, changes or ruptures that characterized Sharia during the colonial and the postcolonial periods and focuses on the processes of transformation. The project relies on extensive archival fieldwork and the intensive reading of texts to investigate the (1) codification/legislation, (2) jurisprudence/legal theory and (3) judicial institutions in six MENA countries representing diverse forms of the colonial encounter. We focus on the agency of legal actors, provide paradigmatic case studies for comparative evaluation and reflect on the fundamental terminological and theoretical questions underlying how “(De)Colonizing Sharia?” can be adequately grasped, researched and described. More broadly, my team and I expect high returns by challenging the scholarship grounded in European terminologies, theory and academic traditions in close cooperation with our colleagues in the MENA region. The project will, thus, break new ground by going beyond current approaches and claims, conducting in-depth and interdisciplinary comparative research on Sharia, and constructing a multivariable database of our outcomes. Its results will be highly relevant for contemporary academic and political discourses in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, and for the emerging field of decolonial legal studies.

Mots-clés : legal history of the middle east colonial law law in context sharia islamic law islamic studies sociology gender database historical court records decolonial research challenging eurocentric scholarship
Projet ERC : PLANETES (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : First Light Imaging — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 500000.0 €

The project's objective is to develop PLANETES, a pioneering ground-based interferometric system, engineered to transform the study of exoplanet atmospheres through high-contrast observations. The primary goal is to significantly enhance the dynamic range of optical interferometry, enabling the observation of exoplanets via their reflected stellar light. Other objectives include investigating the atmospheric composition of known exoplanets and identifying potential protoplanets. The strategy involves setting up a laboratory bench to scrutinize and address the current limitations observed with the GRAVITY instrument at the VLTI. These enhancements will then be deployed at the Paranal Observatory to examine the multitude of exoplanets anticipated from forthcoming Gaia spacecraft data releases. PLANETES is set to be the first ground-based instrument capable of observing exoplanets via reflected light, offering a contrast range of 10 million at less than 100 milliarcsecond. It will significantly surpass the detection and characterization capabilities of current ground-based instruments. In addition to fostering significant advancements in exoplanetary research, this project encompasses the development of a ground-breaking 4-million-pixel infrared camera. This device, equipped with a very low read noise and low dark current detector, will unveil new potential in high-contrast astronomical instrumentation. For the first time, it will allow to simultaneously have a good spectral resolution and high sensitivity, representing a significant leap in the field. This pioneering technology will set the stage for future instruments, yielding broad advantages to the scientific community at large.

Mots-clés : long baseline optical interferometry direct detection of exoplanets
Projet ERC : BINQ (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499333.0 €

How does physical beauty contribute to social inequality? This innovative multi-disciplinary comparative project aims to build a comprehensive new theory that explains how evaluations of physical appearance work, and how they re/produce durable inequalities in today’s media-saturated, service-based consumer societies. It hypothesizes that 1. in contemporary societies beauty is an important form of capital for all genders over the life-course; 2. beauty as a form of capital intersects with existing axes of inequality like gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality; 3. the growing importance of appearance spawns new forms of inequality. The project investigates these hypotheses in 5 global cities on 4 continents: Accra, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tehran. An international team will employ a mixed-method design to study how aesthetic evaluations of appearance are shaped, and identify the mechanisms by which these evaluations shape social dis/advantage. This high risk/high gain project breaks new ground in our understanding of human beauty and its consequences. It brings together scattered insights from many disciplines in a new theoretical model, and tests and refines this model with explorative (Q-sort, survey, ethnography) and hypothesis-testing (lab/ field experiments) methods. It addresses central societal and scientific challenges by foregrounding the importance of a “soft” cultural factor in shaping social divides, and the growing role of media in shaping social dis/advantage and exclusion. All subprojects study two domains where mediatization has made appearance more salient: dating and job search. The project structure is designed to tackle its high risks: its global scope, multidisciplinarity and its ambition to simultaneously develop novel methods and a new theory. The project is led by a cultural sociologist with a strong track record in interdisciplinary and comparative research, and in analyzing the serious consequences of frivolous topics.

Mots-clés : beauty inequality media appearance repertoires evaluation exclusion globalization mixed methods comparative boundaries disadvantage cultural sociology dating job search stratification
Projet ERC : SpikyControl (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498741.0 €

Machines compute with bits and clocks, animals compute with spikes and rhythms. The promise of neuromorphic engineering is that we could transform digital technology by imitating the spiking nature of animal computation, combining analog adaptation and digital reliability. Thirty years after Carver Mead’s initial proposal, event cameras have become a technology and neuromorphic computing has become an intense focus both in academia and in industry. Yet, we still lack a proper theory of event-based computation and event-based design. And the very nature of computing with rhythms instead of clocks is still poorly understood.  We propose that the spike is a consequence of analog computing with mixed (that is, positive and negative) feedback. We will develop a control theory of spiking systems by leveraging the control theory of negative feedback systems to a theory of mixed-feedback systems. The mathematical concept of monotonicity provides a modern and unifying foundation for control theory, convex optimisation, and circuit design. Our spiking control theory is grounded in mixed-monotonicity. It is algorithmic because it leverages the methodology of convex optimisation, and it is physical because it leverages the methodology of circuit theory. A central objective of the proposed research is a novel event-based internal model principle of significance both for control theory and neuroscience. We will investigate the unique features of event-based online adaptation, and suggest the complementary roles of inhibition and excitation in novel spiking control architectures whose learning and adaptation capabilities can be dynamically modulated.  Ultimately, this proposal aims at novel design principles for physical devices that could surpass the learning and adaptation capabilities of current digital machines, advancing the promise of neuromorphic engineering.

Mots-clés : neuromorphic engineering,internal model principle,adaptation and learning
Projet ERC : REALTOWIND (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2458280.0 €

Current Wind-Farm flow Control (WFC) focuses on the interaction of wind turbines through their wakes, and relies on fast heuristic wake models that are mostly considered in an open-loop control framework. However, modern wind farms interact with the atmosphere at much larger scales, such, e.g., as their excitation of atmospheric gravity waves. WFC response is thereby not only governed by intra-farm turbine wakes, but possibly even more by the interaction between the larger atmospheric mesoscales and the farm operation. The only models that realistically capture these aspects down to the wake scale are large-eddy simulations (LES), which are generally run on high-performance computers, yet considered orders of magnitude too slow for use in real-time model predictive control.  Recently however, we have shown that coarse-grid LES integrated in a time-decoupled model predictive control (TDMPC) framework, is about a factor three too slow only for real-time use, while potentially still being effective at realizing the WFC objective. With wind turbines being the largest manmade “flow actuators” existing today, and smaller-sized systems exhibiting faster time scales, the wind farm will be the first turbulent flow system in which LES can be used as a real-time control model.  We aim at inducing a paradigm shift in the use of LES, by developing a first fully integrated LES-based TDMPC and demonstrate it in a high-fidelity emulator environment, as well as, in part, using field data. This raises following fundamental research challenges: diverging sensitivities of perturbations in turbulent flows (chaotic systems) over long time horizons, the sparse nature of measurements in the atmosphere required for state estimation in the control loop, the limited understanding of wind-farm atmosphere interaction in non-neutral stratification, and the efficient emulation of WFC using high-performance computing. My pioneering work in these fields will enable us to tackle these challenges.

Mots-clés : wind farm control wind energy flow control optimal control large eddy simulation
Projet ERC : SPARTACUS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3500000.0 €

Thermodynamics tells us that controlling the magnetic state of media at increasingly higher rates and simultaneously consuming less energy are mutually exclusive. This fundamental dilemma has dramatic societal and environmental consequences as data centres are rapidly becoming the biggest consumers of electricity world-wide.  SPARTACUS proposes to resolve this fundamental dilemma and thereby to inspire conceptually new technology for ultrafast, nearly non-dissipative data storage.  State-of-the-art data storage and non-volatile memory are predominantly based on ferromagnets. Antiferromagnets possess much faster spin dynamics and can sustain bits writing even at THz rates. However, the lack of a net magnetization in thermodynamic equilibrium requires exceedingly strong magnetic fields to control their magnetic moments. This fact has significantly hindered not only applications, but even fundamental studies of antiferromagnetism.  SPARTACUS aims to overcome this fundamental problem and achieve nearly non-dissipative and fastest writing of bits at write-rewrite rates surpassing the 1 THz landmark. Using spectrally and temporally tailored laser pulses to pump electronic and phononic states mediating efficient light-spin coupling, we will push dielectric antiferromagnets strongly out-of-equilibrium, and explore the susceptibility of spins to external stimuli in this non-equilibrium state. SPARTACUS will develop novel ultrafast magnetometers and reveal yet unexplored non-thermodynamic routes to coherently steer spins to a desired bit state. Coherence-mediated ultrafast mechanisms ensure reversible energy transfer to overcome the potential barrier between stable bit states, minimizing the increase of entropy and leading to vanishing heat load.  Although SPARTACUS is fundamental in nature, its long-term ambition is to shift the paradigm from the conventional, slow, energy consuming ferro- to ultrafast and nearly non-dissipative antiferromagnetic data storage.

Mots-clés : ultrafast magnetism,antiferromagnets
Projet ERC : Starstruck (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3000000.0 €

We will use extra-galactic Fast X-ray Transients (FXTs) to study binary neutron star (BNS) mergers. Merging neutron stars are important for the formation of r-process elements and provide standardizable signals allowing the Hubble constant (H0) to be measured maximizing the science output of these multi-messenger events. Comparing BNS mergers with and without an FXT signal provides a way to constrain the elusive equation of state of matter at supra-nuclear densities. Unlike the highly beamed short gamma-ray burst signal associated with BNS mergers, the FXT signal is ~isotropic providing us with the means to quickly localise the merger, even for events out to the BNS merger detection horizon of the 3rd generation of GW detectors such as Einstein Telescope or Cosmic Explorer. A high-risk aspect is that the link between FXTs and BNSs is not yet 100% certain. FXTs manifest as singular short flashes of X-ray photons with durations ranging from minutes to hours. The imminent launch of the all-sky X-ray survey satellite Einstein Probe together with the recent deployment of premiere ground-based instrumentation will revolutionize this field by enabling the discovery and immediate follow-up of a statistically significant sample of more than a hundred bright FXTs over the >3-yr Einstein Probe mission duration. Complemented with a comprehensive study of the FXT host galaxies, this will lead to a breakthrough in our understanding of FXTs and enabling us to measure the yield of r-process elements, H0, and the maximum mass of a neutron star using BNS mergers. In addition to our main goals, we expect serendipitous discoveries in this new research field.

Mots-clés : black holes,transients,supernovae,neutron stars
Projet ERC : QUCUMBER (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3352573.0 €

The study of molecular collisions at the lowest possible energy has emerged as an exciting research frontier. At low energies the wave-character of matter leads to exotic scattering phenomena that reveal the fundamental mechanisms of molecular collisions. Crossed beam methods are ideal to probe collisions with the highest detail, but the lowest energy currently achievable is not sufficient to fully harvest these possibilities. Building upon my recent breakthrough in state-to-state merged beam scattering at record-low energies, the aim of this project is to reduce the currently attainable collision energy by another 2-3 orders of magnitude by combining Stark deceleration, merged beams, laser cooling and velocity map imaging. Using two distinct systems that are characteristic for a large class of molecular interactions, I will measure hitherto unexplored quantum features in the state-to-state integral and differential cross sections. For atom-molecule systems, I will measure scattering resonances and image how the resonance region dominated by a few partial waves evolves into the pure quantum regime where only a single partial wave remains. For collisions between dipolar molecules, I will experimentally study a peculiar self-polarizing effect, probing fundamental features of the long-range dipole-dipole interaction that can be steered from attractive to repulsive. For both systems, I will manipulate the cross sections using external electric fields, and study how the partial waves transform during the collision. The proposed research program will directly visualize how molecular collisions transform from “hot” into “ultracold” at the full quantum mechanical level, providing excellent tests for quantum theories of molecular interactions. It will bridge the gap between the ultracold quantum physics and physical chemistry communities, and will lay the foundations for a new era in the rich history of elucidating molecular reaction dynamics using crossed molecular beams.

Mots-clés : crossed beam scattering,velocity map imaging,stark deceleration,cold collisions
Projet ERC : INSPIRATION (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499675.0 €

Recent years have seen the blossoming of multi-messenger astrophysics where gravitational waves, photons and neutrinos provide complementary views on cosmic explosions involving some of the Universe’s most enigmatic objects, namely neutron stars and black holes. The first observation of a neutron star merger via both gravitational waves and, days later, an electromagnetic flash called "kilonova" enabled huge scientific leaps forward and was therefore celebrated as "2017 Breakthrough of the Year". Multi-messenger astrophysics has an enormous potential to solve many longstanding puzzles such as the origin of the heaviest elements or the nature of the densest matter in the Universe, provided that we understand how the different messengers are physically connected. The gravitational wave and electromagnetic emission stages, however, involve vastly different length and time scales and completely different physical processes. Therefore, currently strong assumptions need to be made how both stages are actually physically connected. On the verge of this transformational era of physics, I propose to calculate for the first time the evolution from the inspiral (milliseconds before the merger) to the time after the kilonova (months later) within a common simulation framework. This will become possible via the novel computational methodology that I have recently developed: the world-wide first Lagrangian hydrodynamics code that also consistently solves Einstein's equations. Compared to conventional Numerical Relativity codes, my new development has major advantages in evolving the merger ejecta which finally cause the kilonova. This project will provide for the first time detailed physical structures of neutron star merger remnants and the first one-to-one mapping between the physics of the merger and the gravitational wave, neutrino and electromagnetic signals. This will present a major breakthrough for both the nuclear astrophysics and the multi-messenger communities.

Mots-clés : formation of heavy elements,computational astrophysics fluid dynamics
Projet ERC : Conformal-EIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1841438.0 €

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

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