Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Heavy-Element Nanowires (HELENA)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Countries involved: Netherlands,Netherlands
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-09-01
End date: 2019-08-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2698447.0
EU funding (EUR): 2698447.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Nanowires are a powerful and versatile platform for a broad range of applications. Among all semiconductors, the heavy-elements materials exhibit the highest electron mobilities, strongest spin-orbit coupling and best thermoelectric properties. Nonetheless, heavy-element nanowires have been unexplored. With this proposal we unite the unique advantages of design freedom of nanowires with the special properties of heavy-element semiconductors. We specifically reveal the potential of heavy-element nanowires in the areas of thermoelectrics, and topological insulators. Using our strong track record in this area, we will pioneer the synthesis of this new class of materials and study their intrinsic materials properties. Starting point are nanowires of InSb and PbTe grown using the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism. Our aims are 1) to obtain highest-possible electron mobilities for these bottom-up fabricated materials by investigating new materials combinations of different semiconductor classes to effectively passivate the nanowire surface and we will eliminate impurities; 2) to investigate and optimize thermoelectric properties by developing advanced superlattice and core/shell nanowire structures where electronic and phononic transport is decoupled; and 3) to fabricate high-quality planar nanowire networks, which enable four-point electronic transport measurements and allow precisely determining carrier concentration and mobility. Besides the fundamentally interesting materials science, the heavy-element nanowires will have major impact on the fields of renewable energy, new (quasi) particles and quantum information processing. Recently, the first signatures of Majorana fermions have been observed in our InSb nanowires. With the proposed nanowire networks the special properties of this recently discovered particle can be tested for the first time.

Keywords: nanowires thermoelectrics
ADVANCED STATISTICAL METHODS FOR HIGH-DIMENSIONAL GENETIC STUDIES (HIGEN)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-06-01
End date: 2019-05-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1627906.0
EU funding (EUR): 1627906.0
Participants: 1
Project status: TERMINATED

Statistical methods play a central role in the field of modern genetics. New technologies are driving an explosion of high-dimensional datasets that will sustain a continuing need for new methods, theory and computationally efficient software. My proposal has two parts that will address the statistical challenges and creation of resources at the frontier of the science in this area. The methods development will be driven by, and applied to, several cutting-edge datasets in the fields of human disease genetics, population genetics and plant and animal breeding, guaranteeing impact on exciting scientific questions. The first part concerns a wide circle of ideas around haplotype estimation, genotype imputation and analysis of sequencing data. The overarching aim is to provide a suite of methods that can estimate haplotypes and impute genotypes in a unified and computationally efficient manner. In addition, we will work to create a reference set of haplotypes from tens of thousands of European and worldwide samples that will form a central resource for human disease and population genetic studies. The second part concerns the development of models for high-dimensional phenotypic data in genome-wide association studies. This is poorly developed area of human disease genetics with great potential for methods development and wide ranging applications.

Keywords: statistics sequencing haplotypes graphical models causal inference data integration
Quantum Information Theory with black BOXes (QITBOX)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Countries involved: Spain
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-01-01
End date: 2019-12-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1487505.0
EU funding (EUR): 1487505.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

With QITBOX we aim to develop a novel device-independent framework for quantum information processing. In this framework, devices are seen as black boxes that only receive inputs and produce outputs. Our main objective is to understand what can and cannot be done for information processing using only the observed correlations among the devices. We will structure our effort along three main research lines: (i) Characterization of quantum correlations: the general objective will be to characterize those correlations that are possible among quantum devices; (ii) Protocols based on correlations: the general objective will be to understand how quantum correlations can be exploited in order to construct relevant information protocols and (iii) Applications to physical setups: here the previous results to concrete physical setups will be applied, such as the quantum-optical realizations of the protocols or the study of the non-local properties of many-body systems. The expected results of QITBOX are: (i) Novel methods for the characterization of quantum correlations, (ii) Improved or novel device-independent protocols, (iii) Proposals for feasible experimental implementations of these protocols and (iv) Novel methods for the study of many-body systems based on correlations. QITBOX is a highly-interdisciplinary project with implications in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering. The execution of the planned research work will provide a unifying framework for a Quantum Information Theory with black BOXes (hence the acronym). Such a framework will bring quantum information processing to an unprecedented level of abstraction, in which information protocols and primitives are defined without any reference to the internal physical working of the devices. This, in turn, will lead to much more robust practical implementations of quantum information protocols, closing the mismatch between theoretical requirements and experimental realisations.

Keywords: quantum information theory,quantum communication,quantum non-locality and entanglement,foundations of quantum physics,quantum optics,many-body physics
Preclinical micro-endoscopy in tumors: targeting metastatic intravasation and resistance (DEEPINSIGHT)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Physiology, Pathophysiology and Endocrinology
Countries involved: Netherlands,Germany,Germany
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-12-01
End date: 2019-11-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2000000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2000000.0
Participants: 3
Project status: CLOSED

Poor prognosis of cancer results from two central progression events, (i) the intravasation of cancer cells into blood vessels which leads to metastasis to distant organs and ultimately lethal tumor overload and (ii) cancer cell survival and adaptation to metabolic stress which causes resistance to anti-cancer therapy and limits life expectancy. Using a novel multiphoton microendoscope device recently developed by myself and collaborators, I here aim to overcome tissue penetration limits and identify important progression events deeply inside tumors. The hard- and software of the microendoscope will be optimized for automated position control and panoramic rotation to sample large tissue volumes and validated for stability and safety. We then will address the locations and mechanisms inside tumors that: (1) enable tumor-cell migration and penetration into blood vessels for distant metastasis and (2) mediate enhanced tumor-cell survival and resistance to experimental radiation- and chemotherapy. This basic inventory will serve to address (3) whether and how the niches for both intravasation and resistance overlap and connected with microenvironmental triggers, including defective blood vessels, signalling pathways of malnutrition and hypoxia, and tissue damage. The strategies include 3D microscopy of live fluorescent multi-color tumors and molecular reporters to record cancer cell migration, proliferation and death in the context with embedding tissue structures and metabolic signals. Once identified and characterized, (4) the niches and signals inducing intravasation and resistance (i.e. integrin adhesion receptors, cytoskeletal regulators, metabolic signalling) will be exploited as targets to enhance experimental radiation and chemotherapy. Preclinical microendoscopy will deliver new insight into cancer progression further contribute impulses to microendoscopy for disease monitoring in patients (“optical biopsy”).
Transforming Raw Data into Information through Virtualization (VIDA)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Computer Science and Informatics
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-05-01
End date: 2019-04-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1976762.4
EU funding (EUR): 1976762.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The unprecedented evolution of computing power, combined with the decreasing costs of computation and storage infrastructure, has revolutionized all scientific fields and enterprises; at the heart of this revolution is the ability to collect unprecedented amounts of data. Real progress, however, depends on how efficiently we can ‘extract value from chaos’, i.e., process the collected data and transform it into useful information. Unfortunately, despite the impressive growth of data management technologies, data analysis application efficiency is hindered by the increasing data growth. The typical business intelligence architecture is far too complex to yield answers productively, with businesses operating large numbers of specialized data processing systems, with data being repeatedly moved, copied or transformed between them. The reason is that, despite tremendous progress, data management tools are based on legacy designs whose requirements are no longer adequate. A novel approach is needed urgently, or users risk losing the ability to leverage their hard-earned data. In this proposal, we identify assumptions that do not scale with today’s massive data explosion, and design a comprehensive end-to-end solution that implements a novel form of data virtualization to vastly simplify data analysis. Our approach removes barriers to data handling and maximizes efficiency for science, businesses, and their users, by enabling new forms of data computation that are unrestrained by how data is collected or stored. This project constructs the building blocks for data-driven computing and the fourth paradigm of scientific discovery, thereby advancing our ability to automatically explore massive and complex datasets at sight, and dictate the new developments in sciences and the industry.

Keywords: data management,data virtualization,database systems,in situ query processing,raw data,big data,data integration,data analytics,business intelligence,data-driven computing
Mixing in Heterogeneous Media Across Spatial and Temporal Scales: From Local Non-Equilibrium to Anomalous Chemical Transport and Dynamic Uncertainty (MHETSCALE)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Products and Processes Engineering
Countries involved: Spain
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2020-03-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1904186.0
EU funding (EUR): 1904186.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Transport, mixing and reaction of solutes and particles in natural media are of central importance in many fields of science and engineering, ranging from contaminant dispersion in geophysical flows to diffusion in living cells. Transport in these intrinsically heterogeneous media is characterized by early and late solute and particle arrivals, tailed spatial distributions, and scale effects in measured parameters. These behaviors cannot be explained by available models based on Fick’s law and are called anomalous despite their ubiquity. The origin of such phenomena lies in heterogeneity-induced mixing processes that lead to fluctuations in chemical concentration, or, in other words, to physical non-equilibrium. Current transport formulations based on the advection-dispersion-reaction equation or phenomenological non-equilibrium models lack the relation to the heterogeneity controls, fail to describe mixing and concentration variability and thus are not suited for the quantification of chemical reactions. The main objective of this proposal is to establish a global predictive framework that quantifies mixing across scales, anomalous transport and reaction, and dynamic uncertainty for heterogeneous media. We propose an integrated approach that links the interrelated phenomena of mixing, anomalous transport and chemical reaction. In short, the idea consists in quantifying microscale heterogeneity-induced mixing in terms of the flow kinematics and heterogeneity structure and linking it to transport through its relation to Lagrangian particle dynamics. These dynamics will be quantified stochastically by a novel generalized continuous time random walk approach and used to model chemical reactions under physical non-equilibrium in order to obtain a new solid approach for simulating reactive and conservative transport through natural media.

Keywords: mixing,heterogeneity,anomalous transport,chemical reaction,dynamic uncertainty,groundwater,porous media,continuous time random walks,particle methods,population dynamics
Land-Climate Interactions: Constraints for Droughts and Heatwaves in a Changing Climate (DROUGHT-HEAT)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Earth System Science
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-09-01
End date: 2019-08-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1952285.0
EU funding (EUR): 1952285.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Land-climate interactions mediated through soil moisture and vegetation play a critical role in the climate system, in particular for the occurrence of extreme events such as droughts and heatwaves. They are, however, poorly constrained in current Earth System Models (ESMs), leading to large uncertainties in climate projections. These uncertainties affect the quality and accuracy of projections of temperature, water availability, and carbon concentrations, as well as that of projected impacts on agriculture, ecosystems, and health. In the past years, in-situ and remote sensing-based datasets of soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and energy and carbon fluxes have become increasingly available, providing untapped potential for reducing associated uncertainties in current climate models. The DROUGHT-HEAT project aims at innovatively exploiting these new information sources in order to 1) derive observations-based diagnostics to quantify and isolate the role of land-climate interactions in past extreme events ("Diagnostic Atlas"), 2) evaluate and improve current ESMs and constrain climate-change projections using the derived diagnostics, and 3) apply the newly gained knowledge to frontier developments in the attribution of climate extremes to land processes and their mitigation through "land geoengineering". The DROUGHT-HEAT project integrates the newest land observational datasets with the latest stream of ESMs. Novel methodologies will be applied to extract functional relationships from the data, and identify key gaps in the ESMs' representation of underlying processes. These will build on physically-based relationships, machine learning tools, and model calibration. In addition, they will encompass the mapping and merging of derived diagnostics in space and time to reduce "blank spaces" in the datasets. The project is unprecedented in its breadth and scope and will allow a major breakthrough in our understanding of the processes leading to heatwaves and droughts.

Keywords: climate extremes earth observations climate modeling soil moisture-atmosphere interactions vegetation-atmosphere interactions
Nonlinear Laser Lithography (NLL)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Countries involved: Türkiye
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-06-01
End date: 2019-05-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1999920.0
EU funding (EUR): 1999920.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Control of matter via light has always fascinated humankind; not surprisingly, laser patterning of materials is as old as the history of the laser. However, this approach has suffered to date from a stubborn lack of long-range order. We have recently discovered a method for regulating self-organised formation of metal-oxide nanostructures at high speed via non-local feedback, thereby achieving unprecedented levels of uniformity over indefinitely large areas by simply scanning the laser beam over the surface. Here, we propose to develop hitherto unimaginable levels of control over matter through laser light. The total optical field at any point is determined by the incident laser field and scattered light from the surrounding surface, in a mathematical form similar to that of a hologram. Thus, it is only logical to control the self-organised pattern through the laser field using, e.g., a spatial light modulator. A simple wavefront tilt should change the periodicity of the nanostructures, but much more exciting possibilities include creation of patterns without translational symmetry, i.e., quasicrystals, or patterns evolving non-trivially under scanning, akin to cellular automata. Our initial results were obtained in ambient atmosphere, where oxygen is the dominant reactant, forming oxides. We further propose to control the chemistry by using a plasma jet to sputter a chosen reactive species onto the surface, which is activated by the laser. While we will focus on the basic mechanisms with atomic nitrogen as test reactant to generate compounds such as TiN and SiN, in principle, this approach paves the way to synthesis of an endless list of materials. By bringing these ideas together, the foundations of revolutionary advances, straddling the boundaries of science fiction, can be laid: laser-controlled self-assembly of plethora of 2D patterns, crystals, and quasicrystals alike, eventually assembled layer by layer into the third dimension -- a 3D material synthesiser.

Keywords: self-organization,nonlinear feedback,ultrafast lasers,ultrafast laser-material processing,nonlinear dynamics
Advance Optical Clocks (ADOC)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Countries involved: France
Call:  (ERC-2013-CoG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2019-03-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1946432.0
EU funding (EUR): 1946432.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The proposed research program has three main objectives. The first and second objectives are to seek extreme precisions in optical atomic spectroscopy and optical clocks, and to use this quest as a mean of exploration in atomic physics. The third objective is to explore new possibilities that stem from extreme precision. These goals will be pursued via three complementary activities: #1: Search for extreme precisions with an Hg optical lattice clock. #2: Explore and exploit the rich Hg system, which is essentially unexplored in the cold and ultra-cold regime. #3: Identify new applications of clocks with extreme precision to Earth science. Clocks can measure directly the gravitational potential via Einstein’s gravitational redshift, leading to the idea of “clock-based geodesy”. The 2 first activities are experimental and build on an existing setup, where we demonstrated the feasibility of an Hg optical lattice clock. Hg is chosen for its potential to surpass competing systems. We will investigate the unexplored physics of the Hg clock. This includes interactions between Hg atoms, lattice-induced light shifts, and sensitivity to external fields which are specific to the atomic species. Beyond, we will explore the fundamental limits of the optical lattice scheme. We will exploit other remarkable features of Hg associated to the high atomic number and the diversity of stable isotopes. These features enable tests of fundamental physical laws, ultra-precise measurements of isotope shifts, measurement of collisional properties toward evaporative cooling and quantum gases of Hg, investigation of forbidden transitions promising for measuring the nuclear anapole moment of Hg. The third activity is theoretical and is aimed at initiating collaborations with experts in modelling Earth gravity. With this expertise, we will identify the most promising and realistic approaches for clocks and emerging remote comparison methods to contribute to geodesy, hydrology, oceanography, etc.

Keywords: geodesy