ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Plate tectonics characterises the complex and dynamic evolution of the outer shell of the Earth in terms of rigid plates. These tectonic plates overlie and interact with the Earth's mantle, which is slowly convecting owing to energy released by the decay of radioactive nuclides in the Earth's interior. Even though links between mantle convection and plate tectonics are becoming more evident, notably through subsurface tomographic images, advances in mineral physics and improved absolute plate motion reference frames, there is still no generally accepted mechanism that consistently explains plate tectonics and mantle convection in one framework. We will integrate plate tectonics into mantle dynamics and develop a theory that explains plate motions quantitatively and dynamically. This requires consistent and detailed reconstructions of plate motions through time (Objective 1). A new model of plate kinematics will be linked to the mantle with the aid of a new global reference frame based on moving hotspots and on palaeomagnetic data. The global reference frame will be corrected for true polar wander in order to develop a global plate motion reference frame with respect to the mantle back to Pangea (ca. 320 million years) and possibly Gondwana assembly (ca. 550 million years). The resulting plate reconstructions will constitute the input to subduction models that are meant to test the consistency between the reference frame and subduction histories. The final outcome will be a novel global subduction reference frame, to be used to unravel links between the surface and deep Earth (Objective 2).

2 499 010 €

Start date: 2011-05-01, End date: 2016-04-30

A large social science literature tries to describe and understand the causes and consequences of crime, usually focusing on individuals’ criminal activity in isolation. The ambitious aim of this research project is to establish a broader perspective of crime that takes into account the social context in which it takes place. The findings will inform policymakers on how to better use funds both for crime prevention and the rehabilitation of incarcerated criminals. Criminal activity is often a group phenomenon, yet little is known about how criminal networks form and what can be done to break them up or prevent them from forming in the first place. Overlooking victims of crime and their relationships to criminals has led to an incomplete and distorted view of crime and its individual and social costs. While a better understanding of these social interactions is crucial for designing more effective anti-crime policy, existing research in criminology, sociology and economics has struggled to identify causal effects due to data limitations and difficult statistical identification issues. This project will push the research frontier by combining register datasets that have never been merged before, and by using several state-of-the-art statistical methods to estimate causal effects related to criminal peer groups and their victims. More specifically, we aim to do the following: -Use recent advances in network modelling to describe the structure and density of various criminal networks and study network dynamics following the arrest/incarceration or death of a central player in a network. -Obtain a more accurate measure of the societal costs of crime, including actual measures for lost earnings and physical and mental health problems, following victims and their offenders both before and after a crime takes place. -Conduct a randomized controlled trial within a prison system to better understand how current rehabilitation programs affect criminal and victim networks.

1 187 046 €

Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28

The UN’s approach to climate policy is to focus on national emission caps for greenhouse gases. Most of the economic theory on environmental agreements is also studying such a demand-side approach, even though it is well known that such an approach has several flaws, including carbon leakage and the incentive to free ride. Recent theory has suggested that a better approach may be to focus on the supply-side of the equation, rather than the demand-side. While this recent theory is promising, it is only indicative and has several shortcomings that must be analysed. The goal of this project is to investigate in depth how to best use conservation as an environmental policy tool. The project aims at integrating the theory of emissions and pollution with a model of extraction and thus the supply of exhaustible resources in a coherent and dynamic game-theoretic framework. I will apply this framework to analyse negotiations, agreements, and contracts on extraction levels, and how such policies can interact, complement or substitute for agreements focusing on consumption/emissions. It will also be important to develop and apply the tools of political economics to investigate which (second-best) agreement one may expect to be feasible as equilibria of the game. For highly asymmetric settings, where the possessors of the resource are few (such as for tropical forests), side transfers are necessary and contract theory will be the natural analytical tool when searching for the best agreement. However, also standard contract theory needs to be developed further once one recognizes that the “agent” in the principal-agent relationship is an organization or a government, rather than an individual.

1 571 554 €

Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31

From astrophysics to high-energy physics and quantum gravity, black holes (BHs) have acquired an ever increasing role in fundamental physics, and are now part of the terminology of many important branches of theoretical and observational physics. It has been established that supermassive BHs lurk at the center of many galaxies and provide fertile ground for stellar growth and evolution. Millions of stellar-mass BHs populate the galaxies, and power violent processes such as gamma-ray bursts, etc. In high-energy physics, the gauge/gravity duality has created a powerful framework for the study of strongly coupled gauge theories and found applications in connection with the experimental program on heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC, among many others. As emphasized by Maldacena and Witten, BHs play a special role in the correspondence: confinement in QCD may be related via the Hawking-Page phase transition to BHs in anti-de Sitter (AdS). Given the central role that BHs have been claiming in physics, a major task for theoreticians is to understand processes in which they are involved. With the advent of techniques to evolve BH spacetimes numerically, the field is undergoing a phase transition from a promising branch of general relativity to one of the most exciting fields in 21st century research that will open up unprecedented opportunities to expand and test our understanding of fundamental physics and the universe. This project aims at evolving numerically BHs in generic backgrounds, in a fully non-linear framework. We intend to generalize all the machinery developed in the last 30 years for asymptotically flat, (3+1) dimensional spacetimes to other geometries and field equations. This allows a number of fundamental questions to be tackled, from tests of the cosmic censorship to an understanding of the stability and phase diagrams of these objects and how different field equations can impact on gravitational-wave emission

915 000 €

Start date: 2010-12-01, End date: 2015-11-30