ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

A new class of devices exploiting Fano resonances and with important applications in information technology is suggested. Typically, the resonance of a system is described by a frequency and a lifetime, leading to a Lorentzian lineshape function. If the system instead involves interference between a discrete resonance and a continuum, a Fano lineshape appears with fundamentally different characteristics. Here, the Fano resonance is used to make a novel integrated mirror, enabling realization of Fano lasers, Fano switches and quantum Fano devices. These devices challenge well-accepted paradigms for photonic devices. The goals of the project are to demonstrate a laser with modulation bandwidth greatly exceeding all existing lasers; a nanolaser with linewidth three orders of magnitude smaller than existing nanocavity lasers; and a switch that operates at femtojoule energies and provides gain. Such devices are important for realizing high-speed optical interconnects and networks between and within chips. An increasing fraction of the global energy consumption is being used for data communication, and photonics operating at very high data rates with ultra-low energy per bit has been identified as a key technology to enable a sustainable growth of capacity demands. Existing device designs, however, cannot just be scaled down to reach the goals for next-generation integrated devices. The Fano mirror will also be used to demonstrate control at the single-photon level, which will enable high-quality on-demand single-photon sources, which are much demanded devices in photonic quantum technology. These devices all rely on the unique properties of the Fano mirror, which provides a new resource for ultrafast dynamic control, noise suppression and ultra-low energy operation. Using photonic crystal technology the project will achieve its goals in a concerted effort involving development of new theory, new nanofabrication techniques and advanced experiments.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

JustSites studies the multitude of localities in which international criminal justice is produced, received and has impact. Building an innovative scientific vocabulary, the project understands these justice sites to be social topographies in which the political, legal and professional activities that collectively create international criminal justice are developed. The justice sites include locations in which forensic exhumations are carried out, NGO offices in conflict zones, foreign ministries, private law firms, media outlets, academic research centers, and the international criminal courts. These sites are closely related, and all depend on and compete with each other to define the direction of international criminal justice. With its analysis of justice sites, the project moves beyond the conventional focus on courts and their context to investigate instead the balances of authority and power that affect the relations between these topographies and thus drive the development of international criminal justice as a field of law. To investigate the relational topography of justice sites, the multidisciplinary project analyzes how these sites produce international criminal justice ideas and practices, and how such ideas and practices are received and have impact in other sites. By following the impact of ideas and practices as they move from one site to another, the relative and perceived authority and power of these sites will be identified and analyzed. Through their productive and receptive character, the justice sites also communicate the results of international criminal justice to broader audiences, labelling them in the process as a success or a failure. Therefore, contributing the first investigation of the topography of justice sites is not only of significant value as frontier research, but is crucial for understanding the wider societal, legal and political impact of this field of law.

1 497 436 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

The burdens of dealing with administrative rules and red tape in government are a fact of life around the world, ranging from small hassles to heavy burdens in the form of stigmatizing processes of proving eligibility and facing potential sanctions. In light of the immense importance of such burdens for millions of people and for the effectiveness of benefit programs, we know surprisingly little about the conditions that give rise to experiences of burden. POAB combines and extends extant theory and uses a unique combination of experimental methods and data to explain how, why, and for whom administrative rules are experienced as burdensome. POAB studies comprehensive rules regarding unemployment and social benefits and will provide novel register, physiological, and survey measures of welfare benefit recipients’ experiences of burden. I develop and test three theories to explain differences in experiences of burden: 1) How resource scarcity causes cognitive load and hence reduces the ability to cope with rules; 2) How self-efficacy increases the ability to cope with rules; and 3) How perceptions of being undeserving cause stigma and stress. POAB analyses the causal impact of rules on burden. To this end, I use a unique combination of complementary experimental methods in political science: 1) Cross-national lab experiments with physiological measurement and manipulations of rules, scarcity, efficacy and deservingness perceptions; 2) Cross-national survey experiments to assess different aspects of rules in different contexts; 3) Quasi- and field experiments to assess the impact of rules on register measures of burdens in a real-world context. POAB offers a fundamentally new interdisciplinary approach by bridging the gap between research on administrative burdens and psychological perspectives. The project’s output will provide profound knowledge of citizens’ experiences of burden and the inequalities in such experiences among recipients of major welfare benefits.

1 499 611 €

Start date: 2019-02-01, End date: 2024-01-31

MPC is a cryptographic technique that allows a set of mutually distrusting parties to compute any joint function of their private inputs in a way that preserves the confidentiality of the inputs and the correctness of the result. Examples of MPC applications include secure auctions, benchmarking, privacy-preserving data mining, etc. In the last decade, the efficiency of MPC has improved significantly, especially with respect to evaluating functions expressed as Boolean and arithmetic circuits. These advances have allowed several companies worldwide to implement and include MPC solutions in their products. Unfortunately, it now appears (and it’s partially confirmed by theoretical lower bounds) that we have reached a wall with respect to possible optimizations of current building blocks of MPC, which prevents MPC to be used in critical large-scale applications. I therefore believe that a radical paradigm-shift in MPC research is needed in order to make MPC truly practical. With this project, I intend to take a step back, challenge current assumptions in MPC research and design novel MPC solutions. My hypothesis is that taking MPC to the next level requires more realistic modelling of the way that security, privacy and efficiency are defined and measured. By combining classic MPC techniques with research in neighbouring areas of computer science I will fulfill the aim of the project and in particular: 1) Understand the limitations of current abstract models for MPC and refine them to more precisely capture real world requirements in terms of security, privacy and efficiency. 2) Use the new models to guide the developments of the next generation of MPC protocols, going beyond current performances and therefore enabling large-scale applications. 3) Investigate the necessary privacy-utility trade-offs that parties undertake when participating in distributed computations and define MPC functionalities that encourage cooperation for rational parties.

1 495 902 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31