ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Many major and devastating floods have occurred around the world recently. Their number and magnitude seems to have increased but such changes are not clear. More surprisingly, the exact causes of changes remain a mystery. Although, drivers such as climate and land use change are known to play a critical role, their complex interactions in flood generation have not been disentangled. The main objectives of this project are to understand how changes in land use and climate translate into changes in river floods, what are the factors controlling this relationship and what are the uncertainties involved. We decipher the relationship between changes in floods and their drivers by analysing the processes separately for different flood types such as flash floods, rain-on-snow floods and large scale synoptic floods. We then use data from catchments in transects across Europe to build a probabilistic flood-change model that explicitly describes the change mechanisms. The model is unconventional as it does not take a reductionist approach but conceptualises the dominant flood change processes at the catchment scale. We test the model on long high-quality flood data series. We use the model as well as the temporal and spatial data variability to quantify the sensitivity of floods to climate and land use change and estimate the uncertainties involved. The data are already available to me or will be made available through my excellent contacts in Europe. For the first time, it will be possible to systematise the effects of land use and climate on floods which will provide a vital step towards predicting how floods will change in the future.

2 263 565 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2017-03-31

Antihydrogen is the simplest atom consisting entirely of antimatter. Since its counterpart hydrogen is one of the best studied atoms in physics, a comparison of antihydrogen and hydrogen offers one of the most sensitive tests of CPT symmetry. CPT, the successive application of charge conjugation, parity and time reversal transformation is a fundamental symmetry conserved in the standard model (SM) of particle physics as a consequence of a mathematical theorem. These conditions for this theorem to be fulfilled are not valid any more in extensions of the SM like string theory or quantum gravity. Furthermore, even a tiny violation of CPT symmetry at the time of the big bang could be a cause of the observed antimatter absence in the universe. Thus the observation of CPT violation might offer a first indication for the validity of string theory, and would have important cosmological consequences. This project proposes to measure the ground state hyperfine (HFS) splitting of antihydrogen (HBAR), which is known in hydrogen with relative precision of 10^–12. The experimental method pursued within the ASACUSA collaboration at CERN-AD consists in the formation of an antihydrogen beam and a measurement using a spin-flip cavity and a sextupole magnet as spin analyser like it was done initially for hydrogen. A major milestone was achieved in 2010 when antihydrogen was first synthesized by ASACUSA. In the first phase of this proposal, an antihydrogen beam will be produced and the HBAR-HFS will be measured to a precision of around 10^–7 using a single microwave cavity. In a second phase, the Ramsey method of separated oscillatory fields will be used to increase the precision further. In parallel methods will be developed towards trapping and laser cooling the antihydrogen atoms. Letting the cooled antihydrogen escape in a field free region and perform microwave spectroscopy offers the ultimate precision achievable to measure the HBAR-HFS and one of the most sensitive tests of CPT.

2 599 900 €

Start date: 2012-03-01, End date: 2017-02-28

Metal oxide surfaces and interfaces play a key role in energy-related applications and in novel schemes for electronic devices that exploit the special physical and chemical properties of these promising materials. For progress in both areas, a detailed, mechanistic understanding of the atomic and molecular processes that occur at oxide surfaces and interfaces is critical. Experiments on well-characterized model systems in conjunction with computational modelling can provide such insights, but current investigations are limited in the range of materials and scope of phenomena that can be studied, and to experiments in a low-pressure environment. Research conducted in this project will push these limits by: • Developing new methodologies for atomic-scale investigations of the subsurface region of oxides with mixed electronic and ionic conduction to measure mass and charge transport across oxide interfaces. • Combining cutting-edge molecular beam epitaxy techniques with atomically-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy to synthesize samples of multi-component metal oxide materials with tailored surface properties. • Establishing a new research thrust that will combine both ex-situ and in-situ electrochemical surface science techniques to study structurally well characterized metal oxide surfaces in an aqueous environment.

2 496 100 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2017-01-31

One of the most important developments in modern physics was the recent emergence of quantum information science, which by its very nature is broadly multidisciplinary. It was started by investigations of the foundations of quantum mechanics, and fundamental quantum concepts, most notably, entanglement, play a key role. We are now at an historic moment where a major qualitative step, both in developing a new technology and applying it to new fundamental questions, can be made. In this proposal, we aim to combine the investigation of fundamental questions with the development of micro-optics technology to reach a new level of both quantum information experiments and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics. We propose to utilize the advanced development of micro-optics to build novel integrated quantum optics photonic chips. High quality micro-optics will allow precise control over many properties, including birefringence, dispersion, periodicity, and even absorptive properties. We will combine this with novel highly efficient detectors, hopefully, in the long run, also integrated into the same microchips. By their very nature, the new multi-mode devices will make new higher-dimensional regions of Hilbert space and new types of multi-photon entanglement accessible to experiment. Such devices will enable many new fundamental investigations of quantum mechanics, such as, to give just one example, exploring quantum complementarity both between different numbers of photons and as a function of Hilbert space dimension with significant mathematical implications. Most importantly, we are convinced that many new ideas will arise throughout the project. The new integrated quantum optical chips will also be important in quantum computation, specifically with cluster states and similar complex quantum states. With these chips, we will realize multi-qubit procedures and algorithms and demonstrate the feasibility of all-optical quantum computation in realistic scenarios.

1 750 000 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31