ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Our understanding of the emergence and dispersal of the earliest tool-making hominins has been revolutionised in the last decade, with sites in eastern Africa and China pushing both events more than half a million years earlier than previously thought. Traditional models linking biological speciation, cultural innovation and migration events with climatic pulses have remained theoretical, and recent discoveries suggest that the picture of the earliest human colonization across the Old World is far more complex, demanding heuristic approaches to understand the biogeography and adaptive behaviours of early humans. This project will be the first substantive attempt to produce a global synthesis of earliest human occupation dynamics by comparing the world’s longest sequences of early archaeological sites, namely eastern Africa and China. Our objective is to understand the alternative evolutionary trajectories adopted by hominins that shared an overarching biological and cultural background, but who faced different climatic and biogeographic challenges and opportunities. The ambition of our global-scale objectives is accompanied by the unmatched quality of our datasets and the ground-breaking perspective we will adopt in their study. Fieldwork in the two most renowned sequences in each region alongside a primary study of additional top-quality assemblages in both subcontinents, will be combined with extensive metadata sets to produce comprehensive views of temporal trends and paleoecological patterns. Our state-of-the-art methodological sets (which combine an exceptionally diverse range of disciplines from geochemistry to niche modelling) and ground-breaking analytical perspective (which considers data from micro-stratigraphy to satellite imaging) will enable us to develop new approaches to challenge established paradigms and produce a new picture of the biogeographic adaptations of early stone-tool makers.

2 499 996 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30

Robust disruptive materials will be essential for the “wireless everywhere” to become a reality. This is because we need a paradigm shift in mobile communications to meet the challenges of such an ambitious evolution. In particular, some of these emerging technologies will trigger the replacement of the magnetic microwave ferrites in use today. This will namely occur with the forecasted shift to high frequency mm-wave and THz bands and in novel antennas that can simultaneously transmit and receive data on the same frequency. In both cases, operating with state-of-the-art ferrites would require large external magnetic fields incompatible with future needs of smaller, power-efficient devices. To overcome these issues, we target ferrites featuring the so far unmet combinations of low magnetic loss and large values of magnetocrystalline anisotropy, magnetostriction or magnetoelectric coupling. The objective of FeMiT is developing a novel family of orthorhombic ferrites based on ε-Fe2O3, a room-temperature multiferroic with large magnetocrystalline anisotropy. Those properties and unique structural features make it an excellent platform to develop the sought-after functional materials for future compact and energy-efficient wireless devices. In the first part of FeMiT we will explore the limits and diversity of this new family by exploiting rational chemical substitutions, high pressures and strain engineering. Soft chemistry and physical deposition methods will be both considered at this stage. The second part of FeMiT entails a characterization of functional properties and selection of the best candidates to be integrated in composite and epitaxial films suitable for application. The expected outcomes will provide proof-of-concept self-biased or voltage-controlled signal-processing devices with low losses in the mm-wave to THz bands, with high potential impact in the development of future wireless technologies.

1 989 967 €

Start date: 2019-05-01, End date: 2024-04-30

We propose to engineer stable-highly luminescent heterostructures based on defect tolerant benign perovskites and their integration into efficient planar/thin film optoelectronic devices. Primary targeted devices are: blue and white planar electroluminescent devices, high efficiency solar cells and electrically pumped lasers. We will use processing methods that are compatible with large area industrial processes, in particular focusing on vapour deposition using thermal sublimation of the perovskite precursors. The boundaries of this simple, scalable and economic coating method will be determined using an advanced real time in-situ optical monitoring system based on hyperspectral imaging. This tool will unveil the limits and processing conditions for the preparation of uniform and very thin (< 10 nm) crystalline thin-film semiconductors. We will also attempt to replace the toxic lead in today’s most studied perovskite materials, by less toxic materials such as tin and silver/bismuth mixtures. Here vacuum based processing is beneficial in view of the limited air-stability and solubility of their pre-cursor salts. Accurate vapour deposition methods will allow the fabrication of perovskites in multiple layered heterostructures (MLH) that passivate the perovskite crystal boundaries. This will increase their thermal and structural stability and above all their photoluminescence efficiency. With the sophisticated processing control, multiple quantum wells (MQWs) will be engineered. MQWs are promising for light-emitting devices, in particular for lasers. The impact of the project is large on various fields ranging from processes, materials and device engineering, physics, and energy. High efficiency, planar LEDs and solar cells, can shift the energy landscape and strongly help to meet the worlds CO2 reduction targets. The demonstration of electrically pumped lasing in easily processed thin film semiconductors will generate so far un-available fields of science.

2 499 175 €

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

The relations between cultural developments and environmental change among hunter-gatherers are crucial for studying population dynamics during the last glaciation (110,000–11,700 years ago). However, proposing solid interpretations on how climate and environment variability affected the social and techno-economic organisation of hominins, requires robust geoarchaeological, chronological, and palaeoecological evidence. In the Iberian Peninsula, a key area for this period due to its geographic position and ecological variability, models on these topics are biased by the poor quality of available evidence for its interior lands. The Iberian interior has been traditionally depicted as a marginal and few populated region due to its harsh ecological conditions compared to the coastal areas. Based on preliminary data suggesting that this picture could be wrong, I hypothesize (1) that the human settlement of interior Iberia during this period was more stable than previously thought and (2) that his has relevant implications at the European scale for problems such as the replacement of Neandertals by modern humans, the first modern human peopling of Europe, and the patterns of land use and mobility during the coldest stages of the last glacial. To test these hypotheses, this project will investigate population dynamics and human-environment interactions of the last Neandertals and first modern humans in interior Iberia based on completely unprecedented evidence gathered by means of a macro-regional and interdisciplinary research project. This involves the participation of a wide team of scholars coordinated by the PI, and a network of methods including field surveys, geoarchaeological excavations and chronometric, paleoecological, zooarchaeological, techno-economic and symbolic studies. The results will significantly change our views on key biocultural and ecological processes of the European prehistory, and the way human societies have dealt with challenging environments.

1 387 515 €

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