ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Goal of the 4DPHOTON project is the development and construction of a photon imaging detector with unprecedented performance. The proposed device will be capable of detecting fluxes of single-photons up to one billion photons per second, over areas of several square centimetres, and will measure - for each photon - position and time simultaneously with resolutions better than ten microns and few tens of picoseconds, respectively. These figures of merit will open many important applications allowing significant advances in particle physics, life sciences or other emerging fields where excellent timing and position resolutions are simultaneously required. Our goal will be achieved thanks to the use of an application-specific integrated circuit in 65 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, that will deliver a timing resolution of few tens of picoseconds at the pixel level, over few hundred thousand individually-active pixel channels, allowing very high rates of photons to be detected, and the corresponding information digitized and transferred to a processing unit. As a result of the 4DPHOTON project we will remove the constraints that many light imaging applications have due to the lack of precise single-photon information on four dimensions (4D): the three spatial coordinates and time simultaneously. In particular, we will prove the performance of this detector in the field of particle physics, performing the reconstruction of Cherenkov photon rings with a timing resolution of ten picoseconds. With its excellent granularity, timing resolution, rate capability and compactness, this detector will represent a new paradigm for the realisation of future Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors, capable of achieving high efficiency particle identification in environments with very high particle multiplicities, exploiting time-association of the photon hits.

1 975 000 €

Start date: 2019-12-01, End date: 2024-11-30

"The AlchemEast project is devoted to the study of alchemical theory and practice as it appeared and developed in distinct, albeit contiguous (both chronologically and geographically) areas: Graeco-Roman Egypt, Byzantium, and the Near East, from Ancient Babylonian times to the early Islamic Period. This project combines innovative textual investigations with experimental replications of ancient alchemical procedures. It uses sets of historically and philologically informed laboratory replications in order to reconstruct the actual practice of ancient alchemists, and it studies the texts and literary forms in which this practice was conceptualized and transmitted. It proposes new models for textual criticism in order to capture the fluidity of the transmission of ancient alchemical writings. AlchemEast is designed to carry out a comparative investigation of cuneiform tablets as well as a vast corpus of Greek, Syriac and Arabic writings. It will overcome the old, pejorative paradigm that dismissed ancient alchemy as a ""pseudo-science"", by proposing a new theoretical framework for comprehending the entirety of ancient alchemical practices and theories. Alongside established forms of scholarly output, such as critical editions of key texts, AlchemEast will provide an integrative, longue durée perspective on the many different phases of ancient alchemy. It will thus offer a radically new vision of this discipline as a dynamic and diversified art that developed across different technical and scholastic traditions. This new representation will allow us to connect ancient alchemy with medieval and early modern alchemy and thus fully reintegrate ancient alchemy in the history of pre-modern alchemy as well as in the history of ancient science more broadly."

1 997 000 €

Start date: 2017-12-01, End date: 2022-11-30

ArmEn seeks to establish a new framework for studying the southern Caucasus, eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia (CAM) as a space of cultural entanglements between the 9th to 14th centuries. It argues that this region is key to understanding the history of medieval Eurasia but has so far been completely neglected by the burgeoning field of Global Middle Ages. The CAM was on the crossroads of expanding Eurasian empires and population movements, but was removed from major hubs of power. Poly-centrism; political, ethno-linguistic, and religious heterogeneity; frequently shifting hegemonic hierarchies were key aspects of its, nevertheless, inter-connected landscape. This fluidity and complexity left its mark on the cultural products – textual and material – created in the CAM. ArmEn aims to trace shared features in the multi-lingual textual and artistic production of CAM and correlate them to the circulation of ideas and concepts, as well as to real-life interactions, between multiple groups, identifying the locations and agents of entanglements. The large but under-utilised body of Armenian sources to be explored together with those in Arabic, Georgian, Greek, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish, will illuminate cultural entanglements between Muslim and Christian Arabs, Byzantines, Syriac Christians, Georgians, Caucasian Albanians, Turko-Muslim dynasties, Kurds, Iranians, Western Europeans, and Mongols, that inhabited, conquered, or passed through and produced cultural goods in CAM. Evidence from manuscript illuminations and numismatics will provide a material cultural dimension to the analysis. ArmEn will create a trans-cultural vision of the CAM, bridging area studies into a unifying framework, bringing together various disciplinary approaches (philology, literary criticism, religious studies, art history, numismatics, etc.), to build a narrative synthesis in which the dynamics of cross-cultural entanglements in the CAM emerge in their spatial and temporal dimensions.

1 999 994 €

Start date: 2020-10-01, End date: 2025-09-30

The Milky Way is a complex system, with dynamical and chemical substructures, where several competing processes such as mergers, internal secular evolution, gas accretion and gas flows take place. To study in detail how such a giant spiral galaxy was formed and evolved, we need to reconstruct the sequence of its main formation events with high (~10%) temporal resolution. Asterochronometry will determine accurate, precise ages for tens of thousands of stars in the Galaxy. We will take an approach distinguished by a number of key aspects including, developing novel star-dating methods that fully utilise the potential of individual pulsation modes, coupled with a careful appraisal of systematic uncertainties on age deriving from our limited understanding of stellar physics. We will then capitalise on opportunities provided by the timely availability of astrometric, spectroscopic, and asteroseismic data to build and data-mine chrono-chemo-dynamical maps of regions of the Milky Way probed by the space missions CoRoT, Kepler, K2, and TESS. We will quantify, by comparison with predictions of chemodynamical models, the relative importance of various processes which play a role in shaping the Galaxy, for example mergers and dynamical processes. We will use chrono-chemical tagging to look for evidence of aggregates, and precise and accurate ages to reconstruct the early star formation history of the Milky Way’s main constituents. The Asterochronometry project will also provide stringent observational tests of stellar structure and answer some of the long-standing open questions in stellar modelling (e.g. efficiency of transport processes, mass loss on the giant branch, the occurrence of products of coalescence / mass exchange). These tests will improve our ability to determine stellar ages and chemical yields, with wide impact e.g. on the characterisation and ensemble studies of exoplanets, on evolutionary population synthesis, integrated colours and thus ages of galaxies.

1 958 863 €

Start date: 2018-04-01, End date: 2023-09-30