Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ANACONDA (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NWO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997105.0 €

In 1929, one year after the formulation of his world-famous equation, Paul Dirac wrote that "the fundamental laws (…) of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, (…) but lead to equations that are too complex to be solved". While Dirac was referring to analytical solutions to his equation, numerical approaches have made tremendous progress over the past century. Nonetheless, the so-called strongly correlated materials continue to defy a common experimental and computational access to some of their intriguing exotic properties in solids.  In this proposal, I will investigate correlated transition-metal oxides, which undergo a phase transition upon external perturbation, such as temperature, pressure, strain or laser excitation. I will develop a unique table-top ultrafast soft-X-ray absorption and holographic imaging experiment. The measurements will follow the attosecond to picosecond dynamic switching between metallic and insulating phases after laser excitation of transition metal oxides with element-specific absorption measurements, and simultaneously spatially resolve the ultrafast emerging nanometer texture of the phase transition. The unprecedented measurement of attosecond nanoscale dynamics will enable to unambiguously identify the mechanism and ultimate speed of phase transitions.  I will use the fundamental insight from attosecond nanoscopy to test the hypothesis, that structural and electronic IMTs coexist and can be steered through both sample engineering and attosecond light-field control, which will pave the way towards PHz oxide electronics. Controlling the currently absent spatial uniformity of phase transitions on the nanoscale and the concomitant order-of-magnitude resistivity changes are key ingredients to guide transition-metal oxides towards their long-heralded usage in future oxide electronics as thin-film transistors, which will finally enable ReRAM memory to enter high-volume manufacturing.

Mots-clés : attosecond,strongly correlated materials,transition metal oxides,phase transitions
Projet ERC : Epaphus (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NWO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 971910.6 €

A fundamental goal of astronomy in the coming decades is to determine whether a planet around another star could be habitable. An important piece in this habitability puzzle is the environmental conditions of an exoplanet: the 'space weather' it experiences. However, determining the space weather conditions around a star has been challenging because of the limited sensitivity of low-frequency radio telescopes. A low-frequency radio detection of a star or exoplanet can provide evidence of plasma ejection from the star, or a direct measurement of an exoplanet's magnetic field strength. Such information determines if a planet's atmosphere can survive the onslaught of stellar activity. Recently, I achieved the first low-frequency detections of quiescent stars via a novel polarisation technique using the telescope LOFAR. The radio emission is likely generated by star-planet interactions -- representing a new way to discover exoplanets and characterise their space weather environment. These first detections represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of other detectable stellar systems as I expand my observations over the northern sky. I am on the precipice of conducting the first ever population analysis of the types of stars that emit at low frequencies, revealing whether they are orbited by exoplanets, and what environmental conditions such planets experience.  This grant will allow me to scale my new low-frequency calibration and polarimetric techniques to determine the space weather of stars and exoplanets via: 1) determining the radio periodicity from star-exoplanet interactions; 2) directly detecting radio emission from an exoplanet; and 3) tracing the kinematics of ejected stellar plasma.  Such information will facilitate a leap in our understanding of the plasma environments around stars and the underlying laws governing the generation of planetary magnetic fields -- information that will guide us in the coming revolution in exoplanet habitability.

Mots-clés : space weather,space physics,radio stars
Projet ERC : ERA-ARE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Federal Institute of Hydrology — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : BFG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 237500.0 €

The detrimental effects on ecosystems and human health caused by the emerging contamination of aquatic environment by pharmaceuticals urges a disruptive prevention strategy. These drugs, their metabolites and transformation products (TPs) are stable, poorly biodegraded, and recalcitrant. Though novel mitigation measures have been proposed, they are insufficient and often risky due to the possible generation of TPs. Under this increasingly deteriorating scenario for future generations, ERA|ARE aspires to build a strong ground for the realization of an internationally leading research group dedicated to promoting environmental safety. ERA|ARE approach is based on fundamental understanding of enantioselectivity of environmental processes that can impact the fate/behaviour of pharmaceutical contaminants. Fluoroquinolones (FQs), a group of chiral fluorinated antibiotics/anti-cancer agents will be explored as a proof of concept, since most small molecules approved in the last years are either fluorinated and/or chiral, presenting a stable C–F bond and a potentially enantioselective bioactivity. To attain its goals, ERA|ARE will exploit the chirality of selected FQs as a piloting tool to: 1) realize the impact of stereochemistry on antimicrobial resistance (key innovation) by testing the hypothesis that antibiotic resistance (AR) may be acquired in (and not only spread/disseminated by) wastewater treatment plants (never verified before); 2) reveal how to better select drug candidates by biodegradability; 3) pave the way for future directions of Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA); and 4) avoid ecotoxicological effects and bioaccumulation. ERA|ARE will contribute to reduce AR (expected to cause 10 million deaths/year by 2050), raising the alert level for environmental protection and sustainability. ERA|ARE will rebrand the relationship pharmaceutical industry vs environment by disrupting the ERA process and creating pioneering guidelines for the pursuit of safer drugs.

Mots-clés : chiral pharmaceuticals,contaminants of emerging concern,enantioselective processes,transformation products,environmental sustainability,biodegradability,antibiotic resistance,ecotoxicological effects,bioaccumulation
Projet ERC : ChECMate senescence (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IACS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1360196.57 €

The increasing elderly population poses a dual challenge to the viability of both global health and our current welfare systems. One of the pivotal aspects of aging involves the accumulation of damaged cells, known as senescent cells, in organs. While these cells play a role in coordinating tissue repair whenever damage occurs, their aberrant accumulation disturbs normal tissue function, resulting in an unbearable burden that ultimately leads to aging. Understanding how these cells accumulate within the organism, a yet unresolved question, would offer invaluable insights into the aging process. We have recently reported that damaged cells rely on Integrins, a family of membrane proteins, to implement senescence over cell death, leading to their accumulation within injured tissues. Remarkably, Integrins are known as the major cellular receptors binding to the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM). Considering these precedents, we aim to take a step further and investigate whether the composition and status of the ECM can influence the buildup of senescent cells by impacting the choice between senescence and cell death upon injury, a possibility not explored before. Here, we aim to assess whether certain ECM proteins might act as pro-senescence factors by desensitizing damaged cells to death, favoring survival and aberrant senescence instead. We will thoroughly characterize multiple cell culture and mouse models of senescence implementation following damage, aiming to unveil the mechanisms controlling this phenomenon. Leveraging these findings, we will modulate the occurrence of cell senescence through ECM reengineering in mice, seeking to establish a revolutionary approach to address aging and tissue fibrosis. In sum, by uncovering unsuspected links between the ECM status and cell senescence implementation, ChECMate senescence would signify a paradigm change that would enable an unprecedented strategy in targeting cellular senescence in detrimental scenarios.
Projet ERC : DANCINGFOOL (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : École normale supérieure PSL — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ENS PSL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1247500.0 €

A physical system implementing a quantum bit (qubit) is never perfectly isolated from an uncontrolled environment. The system dynamics is thus noisy, modifying randomly the qubit state. This phenomenon of decoherence is the main roadblock to build a stable quantum computing platform. In order to mitigate decoherence, quantum error correction employs only a few code states within a much larger informational space, so that noise-induced dynamics can be detected and corrected before the encoded information gets corrupted. Unfortunately, most known protocols require to control dauntingly complex systems, with a degree of coherence currently out of reach. Our project is to build autonomously error-corrected qubits encoded in high-impedance superconducting circuits. In our protocol, a qubit is encoded in the vast phase-space of the quantum oscillator implemented by each circuit, in the form of Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states. The novelty is that the GKP states are fully stabilized by a modular dissipation, induced by the coherent tunneling of charges through a stroboscopically biased Josephson junction. The coherence of the encoded qubit is expected to exceed that of existing superconducting qubits by orders of magnitude. Furthermore, we propose to perform protected logical gates between encoded qubits by varying adiabatically the parameters of the modular dissipation, paving the way toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. The major experimental challenge of our protocol resides in the exquisite level of control needed over a wide band in the microwave range. We propose to address this challenge by developing novel on-chip filters, tunable couplers and isolators based on periodically modulated, high-impedance, transmission lines. These on-chip components would find a wide range of applications in quantum technologies, and favor the advent of large-scale quantum computing platforms.

Mots-clés : quantum error correction superconducting circuits reservoir engineering microwave engineering gkp
Projet ERC : QCD-BOOST (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : École normale supérieure PSL — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ENS PSL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

In this project we are embarking on the ambitious and exciting journey to advance our understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in 4d, a fundamental theory that describes interactions among quarks and gluons. Our primary focus will be on studying QCD in two different regimes: in the physical regime with two flavours of quarks and in the conformal window. In the physical regime QCD is the theory of Strong interactions responsible for the existence of mesons, baryons and nuclei. QCD in the conformal window holds significant relevance from the purely theoretical prospective and might describe physics beyond the standard model. Although significant progress has been made in studying QCD, its complete understanding remains a challenge. In the last decade there has been an incredible development of bootstrap tools which we will use in this project to obtain a series of groundbreaking results about QCD which are difficult or impossible to obtain by other means. We will use the S-matrix bootstrap to study QCD in the physical regime. Our main goal is to find numerically crossing symmetric, analytic and unitary expressions for scattering amplitudes of pions, protons and neutrons, and perform spectral analysis of resonances described by complex energies. As a secondary goal we will compute non-perturbatively the scattering amplitude in the 3d phi4 model. We will use the conformal bootstrap to study QCD in the left part of the conformal window and perturbation theory to study QCD in the right part of the conformal window in the Veneziano limit. We will attempt to determine the spectrum of Caswell-Banks-Zaks fixed points on both sides. As a secondary goal we will also obtain rigorous bounds on the trace anomalies in generic 4d conformal field theories. Since the bootstrap tools are model independent, in order to study QCD we will augment them with QCD model dependent data which comes from experiments, numerical simulations and ('t Hooft and trace) anomalies.

Mots-clés : qcd,s matrix bootstrap,conformal bootstrap,pions scattering,resonances,conformal window
Projet ERC : HousingAndMortgages (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université de Tilbourg — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1494124.0 €

Worldwide, housing wealth represents the most important asset in households' balance sheet, and mortgage debt is the most important liability. In the past two decades, several countries have experienced house price bubbles, excessive households' leverage, and increasing risk-taking behavior of banks. To limit these phenomena, and in response to the 2008 financial crisis, new regulations have been introduced in housing and mortgage markets. The lack of disaggregate and extensive micro level data on housing and mortgages has so far prevented researchers from carefully investigating these events and the effectiveness of regulation. This project will bridge this gap. I will assemble a unique and extensive platform of datasets on housing and mortgage markets, combining disaggregate information on housing transactions, buyers and sellers, and loan level data on mortgages for two European countries, the Netherlands and Norway. These data will be used to develop and estimate novel structural econometric models of demand and supply in housing and mortgage markets. These models will serve to investigate three main questions of concern to policymakers, and to evaluate the welfare effects of existing and alternative regulations via counterfactual simulations. First, I will investigate a novel demand channel of housing and mortgages driven by the rise of accommodation sharing platforms such as Airbnb. While these platforms provide extra income to households renting their property, they also fuel housing bubbles and affect mortgage markets. Second, I will evaluate the role of mortgage securitization in reducing lenders' funding costs, quantify its effect on lenders' risk taking behavior, and propose regulations to balance this trade off. Last, I will document the distributional effects of leverage regulations, that have helped to reduce credit risk, but have also disproportionally penalized low income households and first time buyers, worsening income and wealth inequality.

Mots-clés : structural estimation,wealth inequality,airbnb,securitization,leverage regulation
Projet ERC : FEDMONEY (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Fondation nationale des sciences politiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FNSP
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1109407.81 €

Monetary policy suffers from a “one size fits all” problem. Central banks typically determine monetary policy by setting a headline interest rate uniformly across their jurisdiction. Yet, in large jurisdictions, the optimal monetary policy on average tends to be suboptimal for economically heterogeneous regions. Outside the realm of monetary policy, a solution to this type of governance problem is widely accepted: federalism. But the state of the art has not analyzed federalism as a paradigm of monetary governance. This is curious especially because it is not uncommon for central banks to be structured institutionally according to federalist principles: split into a central headquarters and decentralized branches. Yet even then monetary policy is determined centrally and uniformly across central bank jurisdictions. FEDMONEY’s research hypothesis is that it is desirable to federalize monetary policy by taking advantage of federal central banking structures to modulate monetary policy differently across economically heterogeneous regions. Its central aim is to develop a systematic legal and economic analysis of monetary federalism, which we currently lack. FEDMONEY seeks to verify its research hypothesis by writing the untold legal history of monetary federalism in the United States and Europe. It will contextualize that history in light of constitutional theories of federalism in both jurisdictions, as well as the intellectual history of economic thought. The project is groundbreaking in that it opens up new horizons for research in law, economics and beyond, and creates a powerful new tool for central banks to shape economic growth and development. FEDMONEY is urgent because central banks rediscovered monetary federalism in their responses to the past decade of economic crisis, but lack a theoretical framework grounded in law and economics to assess its costs and benefits. Absent such a framework, interest in monetary federalism is likely to fade soon.

Mots-clés : monetary policy,federalism
Projet ERC : DRILL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1521000.0 €

Cancer immunotherapies that leverage T cell activities are transforming cancer treatment. Currently, enormous effort has been devoted to empowering T cells to recognize and attack tumor cells. In contrast, the trafficking of T cells into tumors, a crucial prerequisite and limiting factor for effective T cell–tumor cell interactions, receives relatively less attention while at the same time being poorly understood. This is due to the complex and dynamic nature of T cell trafficking and the lack of model systems that allow function-based systematic investigation of the specific process. This proposal integrates innovative functional genomics into physiologically relevant models that recapitulate two essential steps in the migration of effector T cells into tumors to investigate i) chemokine production in the tumor microenvironment (TME) and ii) chemotactic infiltration of T cells into tumors. Here we focus on one of the most devastating cancers, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), because it poses considerable physical and biochemical barriers that restrict the access of effector T cells to tumor cells and substantially resists all available therapies.  We will 1) elucidate the (co)regulatory mechanisms of the expression of chemokines that direct T cell recruitment and exclusion. In parallel, we will 2) develop model systems to systematically reveal cell-intrinsic determinants in T cells that influence their capability to infiltrate tumors. Finally, we will 3) evaluate whether pharmacological or genetic targeting of the modulators of T cell trafficking improves T cell-based cancer immunotherapies.  Collectively, this project will deliver fundamental insight into the mechanisms that regulate T cell trafficking into tumors and may yield novel strategies to broaden or increase the efficacy of the current cancer immunotherapies.

Mots-clés : t cell trafficking,functional genomics,chemokine,immunotherapy,antitumor t cell response
Projet ERC : VIBEBOT (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 878978.0 €

Wireless micro-robots hold great potential for minimally-invasive medicine, since they may allow for targeted drug delivery, in vivo sensing, stimulation, and even new surgical procedures. However, the biggest hurdle for biomedical applications is the penetration of real biological media, for instance, mucus, vitreous, blood clots and tumour tissues. Most current micro-/nano-robots can propel in water, however, the same propulsion mechanisms do not readily transfer to viscoelastic biological media. One major bottleneck is that it is not possible to exert enough force for propulsion in a system that could one day also accommodate a human. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop vibrational microdevices that can actively propel and wirelessly sense in viscoelastic biological tissues. The excited mechanical vibration is coupled with the frequency-dependent fluidic rheology to increase the energy release rate, to reduce the penetration force needed for tissue rupture, and thus to facilitate an easier penetration of the tissues. We will investigate the fundamental mechanisms of propulsion at low Reynolds number in viscoelastic materials. The microrheology of the biological fluids will be measured and modelled, and it will allow us to optimize the shape and gait of the micro-robot to exploit the complex rheological properties of biological tissues and generate propulsion. The proposed work will also advance three-dimensional fabrication technologies for asymmetric micro-/nanostructures as key elements to interact with tissues to facilitate efficient locomotion. We will also develop novel sensing methods for in vivo sensing and localization of the microdevices. Our research will lead to a new class of micro-robots - the VIBEBOTS that will be able to actively penetrate real tissues, and open up outstanding opportunities for useful biomedical applications.

Mots-clés : bio rheology,mechanical vibrations,micro robotics,micro propulsion,microdevices,biomedical engineering