ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Spintronics, in which both the spin and the charge of the electron are used, is one of the most exciting new disciplines to emerge from nanoscience. The 3SPIN project seeks to open a new research front within spintronics: namely 3-dimensional spintronics, in which magnetic nanostructures are formed into a 3-dimensional interacting network of unrivalled density and hence technological benefit. 3SPIN will explore early-stage science that could underpin 3-dimensional metallic spintronics. The thesis of the project is: that by careful control of the constituent nanostructure properties, a 3-dimensional medium can be created in which a large number of topological solitons can exist. Although hardly studied at all to date, these solitons should be stable at room temperature, extremely compact and easy to manipulate and propagate. This makes them potentially ideal candidates to form the basis of a new spintronics in which the soliton is the basic transport vector instead of electrical current. ¬3.5M of funding is requested to form a new team of 5 researchers who, over a period of 60 months, will perform computer simulations and experimental studies of solitons in 3-dimensional networks of magnetic nanostructures and develop a laboratory demonstrator 3-dimensional memory device using solitons to represent and store data. A high performance electron beam lithography system (cost 1M¬) will be purchased to allow state-of-the-art magnetic nanostructures to be fabricated with perfect control over their magnetic properties, thus allowing the ideal conditions for solitons to be created and controllably manipulated. Outputs from the project will be a complete understanding of the properties of these new objects and a road map charting the next steps for research in the field.

2 799 996 €

Start date: 2010-03-01, End date: 2016-02-29

"The twin concepts of sustainability and conservation that are so pivotal within current debates regarding economic development and biodiversity protection both contain an inherent temporal dimension, since both refer to the need to balance short-term gains with long-term resource maintenance. Proponents of resilience theory and of development based on ‘indigenous knowledge’ have thus argued for the necessity of including archaeological, historical and palaeoenvironmental components within development project design. Indeed, some have argued that archaeology should lead these interdisciplinary projects on the grounds that it provides the necessary time depth and bridges the social and natural sciences. The project proposed here accepts this logic and endorses this renewed contemporary relevance of archaeological research. However, it also needs to be admitted that moving beyond critiques of the misuse of historical data presents significant hurdles. When presenting results outside the discipline, for example, archaeological projects tend to downplay the poor archaeological visibility of certain agricultural practices, and computer models designed to test sustainability struggle to adequately account for local cultural preferences. This field will therefore not progress unless there is a frank appraisal of archaeology’s strengths and weaknesses. This project will provide this assessment by employing a range of established and groundbreaking archaeological and modelling techniques to examine the development of two east Africa agricultural systems: one at the abandoned site of Engaruka in Tanzania, commonly seen as an example of resource mismanagement and ecological collapse; and another at the current agricultural landscape in Konso, Ethiopia, described by the UN FAO as one of a select few African “lessons from the past”. The project thus aims to assess the sustainability of these systems, but will also assess the role archaeology can play in such debates worldwide."

1 196 701 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31

Computer models based on known physical laws are our primary tool for predicting climate change. Yet the state-of-the-art models exhibit a disturbingly wide range of predictions of future climate change, especially when examined at the regional scale, which has not decreased as the models have become more comprehensive. The reasons for this are not understood. This represents a basic challenge to our fundamental understanding of climate. The divergence of model projections is presumably related to systematic model errors in the large-scale fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum that control regional aspects of climate. That these errors stubbornly persist in spite of increases in the spatial resolution of the models suggests that they are associated with errors in the representation of unresolved processes, whose effects must be parameterised. Most attention in climate science has hitherto focused on the thermodynamic aspects of climate. Dynamical aspects, which involve the atmospheric circulation, have received much less attention. However regional climate, including persistent climate regimes and extremes, is strongly controlled by atmospheric circulation patterns, which exhibit chaotic variability and whose representation in climate models depends sensitively on parameterised processes. Moreover the dynamical aspects of model projections are much less robust than the thermodynamic ones. There are good reasons to believe that model bias, the divergence of model projections, and chaotic variability are somehow related, although the relationships are not well understood. This calls for studying them together. My proposed research will focus on this problem, addressing these three aspects of the atmospheric circulation response to climate change in parallel: (i) diagnosing the sources of model error; (ii) elucidating the relationship between model error and the spread in model projections; (iii) understanding the physical mechanisms of atmospheric variability.

2 489 151 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

"This project explores the concept of agricultural spread as analogous to enforced climate change and asks how cereals adapted to new environments when agriculture was introduced into Europe. Archaeologists have long recognized that the ecological pressures placed on crops would have had an impact on the spread and subsequent development of agriculture, but previously there has been no means of directly assessing the scale and nature of this impact. Recent work that I have directed has shown how such a study could be carried out, and the purpose of this project is to exploit these breakthroughs with the goal of assessing the influence of environmental adaptation on the spread of agriculture, its adoption as the primary subsistence strategy, and the subsequent establishment of farming in different parts of Europe. This will correct the current imbalance between our understanding of the human and environmental dimensions to the domestication of Europe. I will use methods from population genomics to identify loci within the barley and wheat genomes that have undergone selection since the beginning of cereal cultivation in Europe. I will then use ecological modelling to identify those loci whose patterns of selection are associated with ecogeographical variables and hence represent adaptations to local environmental conditions. I will assign dates to the periods when adaptations occurred by sequencing ancient DNA from archaeobotanical assemblages and by computer methods that enable the temporal order of adaptations to be deduced. I will then synthesise the information on environmental adaptations with dating evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe, which reveals pauses that might be linked to environmental adaptation, with demographic data that indicate regions where Neolithic populations declined, possibly due to inadequate crop productivity, and with an archaeobotanical database showing changes in the prevalence of individual cereals in different regions."

2 492 964 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31