CERN Accelerating science

In January 2023, the portfolio of EU projects led by CERN will be joined by HEARTS. Together with its project coordinator, Rubén Garcia Alia, we look at the history of this project and how it further established CERN as a leading player in the radiation effects community.

What is your background and how did you come to work at CERN?

My main interest is the study of radiation-matter interaction and radiation effects on electronics. As an applied physicist, I have been trained at the Complutense University of Madrid and furthered my knowledge in the field at the European Space Agency (ESA) where I spent one year working on this topic. I was there that eleven years ago, I learned about the activities ran at CERN and, from an international organisation to another, started a PhD position. Today, I am leading the Radiation to Electronics (R2E) project at CERN, in charge of ensuring a reliable accelerator operation in spite of radiation effects on electronic components and systems.

From this year, you will coordinate the HEARTS (High-Energy Accelerators for Radiation Testing and Shielding) project. Can you tell me what this project is about?

The HEARTS project provides a solution to an ongoing trend in the space industry. Indeed, in order to reduce the cost of space missions, improve the performance of their electronics and open up new advanced applications, there is an increasing effort to take the advanced, high-performance technologies found on the ground, for example in our mobile phones and cars, and adapt them for space use. However, this improvement comes at the cost of qualifying components that are not intended for use in the radioactive environment of space.

This is where high energy heavy ion testing comes in. Only a very limited number of accelerator facilities in the world are capable of reproducing radiation fields that mimic the real space environment. With the support of the European Commission, HEARTS will aim to strengthen European capabilities in high-energy heavy ion electronics testing. The project will be coordinated by CERN, with GSI as an additional infrastructure and research lab, and other industrial (Airbus, Thales Alenia Space) and academic (University of Padova) partners.

What is the added value of CERN?

CERN plays a leading role in the radiation effects community because of the unique challenges it has faced when the Large Hadron Collider was commissioned in 2010. A major bottleneck, radiation effects on electronics initially caused a lot of downtime and 'lost physics'. In response, CERN built up its capacity in the later years and also consolidated its network by looking outside of the Organisation – most notably in the space domain.

In addition, CERN plays a special role as both a user and a provider of irradiation facilities. In general, industry is the main user of beam time and research institutes and academic centres are the suppliers. Being on both sides of the spectrum, CERN has a good view of both the needs of the community and the capabilities of the infrastructure.

Building on this expertise and its unique position, CERN has continued to increase its leadership role in the radiation effects community by organising conferences and seminars and by running several diverse European projects such as RADSAGA and RADNEXT, which will be discussed later. Today, the Organization is in a very good position to take initiative to build project proposals. It is also worth highlighting that high-energy heavy ion capabilities that will be developed in the CHARM facility at CERN thanks to HEARTS will be an excellent complement to the already very unique and performant mixed-field irradiation opportunities and that, though not as critical as for space applications, high-energy heavy ions can also be beneficial for accelerator electronics testing.

HEARTS will be funded under the Digital, Industry and Space Cluster of Horizon Europe. How does it differ from other projects ran at CERN?

Indeed, while CERN staff are used to hearing about projects under the first pillar of the Framework Programme (Marie Curie calls, European Research Council calls, Research Infrastructure calls), HEARTS belongs to the second pillar.

The main difference between the two pillars lies in the way the calls are designed. The first pillar is a bottom-up call, which means that anyone can submit a proposal in the scientific and technical field of their choice. In the other parts of the programme, notably the second pillar, the topics are predefined by the European Commission and are quite specific.

Although Pillar 2 calls require a higher level of technological preparation, the targeted call makes the competition much less risky than Pillar 1 calls, where the lack of restrictions can generate thousands of applicants. Because we should not only focus on what we know and where we have had recurrent success, I believe that such mechanisms should be encouraged. This is especially true in areas outside particle physics, where everyone knows that what CERN does is relevant beyond the first pillar type activities. Industrial and medical applications are good examples.

Since 2021, you have also been running the RADNEXT project. Can you tell me more about it?

The RADNEXT project was strongly motivated by the observation that, despite the growing demand for radiation effects testing, the overall supply was not really evolving or even contracting. Radiation effects testing activities only represent about 10-20% of the activity of a given accelerator, as they are operated for fundamental (e.g. nuclear, high-energy physics) research or medical applications. One of our challenges in the project is to ensure that the tests can be integrated into the schedule and agenda of the different facilities. 

The project has been designed in a bottom-up approach, building on existing infrastructure and responding to community demand. More specifically, it is about research and industry-oriented radiation testing.

Space is the main actor for radiation effects, but there is a very diverse set of ground-based applications. A large number of high reliability applications are subject to radiation effects. For automotive and medical applications, but also computer servers and nuclear fusion, cosmic and artificial radiation can be a major source of unreliability.

After roughly 18 months of project, we are delighted to see how very diverse beam types (notably heavy ions, protons and neutrons) are provided to radiation effects users worldwide spanning across many different sectors and applications, at no cost to them, and with results that are rendered publicly available for the benefit of the radiation effects community as a whole.  

Do you feel that European projects help make a better science at CERN?

One of the aspects that the European projects puts value on is the outreach and dissemination of the different scientific activities and results. The mindset about the impact of your project and its dissemination within the community still helps me with the way I manage and coordinate other, non-EU-related activities.

European projects are also platform for the careers of early professionals. I was delighted to see that some of the colleagues taking leading roles in HEARTS and RADNEXT had, in fact, taken part in the Marie-Curie project RADSAGA as early-stage researchers six to seven years before. They have been brought up in this European project culture and taught to dare thinking outside the box, to be proactive and to take initiative.

Finally, European projects are useful tools to further innovation at CERN by building capacity. In the case of HEARTS, the need for heavy-ions is pretty much industrial-driven at the moment since it is the European companies, satellite integrators and space module manufacturers that have the need of accessing this type of beams. However, I am certain that once the capacity is in place, the internal need will rise and bring people from CERN, from the experiments and the accelerator world to test their components with heavy-ions.

Open Science has become an integral part of the funding schemes in the past years. For this, we must ensure that the knowledge from projects is not lost and can be reused in the future. What does that mean actually? Basically, you are asked to look after the data, software, publications you might produce in a European project and describe measures on how you preserve them and make them open to the public.

After presenting data management plans last quarter, we explore open access to publications as part of this short series about Open Science in EU projects.

All peer-reviewed scientific publications arising from European Commission funding have to be made available in open access immediately upon publication, with no restrictions on use and with the author retaining the copyright. It means that the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication should be made available without embargo either in a repository or on the publisher website.

In order to comply with those requirements, authors can benefit from dedicated publication funds in the EC grant, those funds can only cover fees for articles published in fully Open Access journals, and the corresponding budget needs to be planned in the grant proposal. Publications with CERN-affiliated authors can of course benefit from the different mechanisms organized by CERN SIS, to implement the CERN Open Access policy, they cover more than 4,000 journals.

A bit lost with all the options? Don’t hesitate to contact us, we are here to support you with any question you might have.

ATTRACT Phase 1B consolidates the support of the European Commission towards the overall ATTRACT initiative, this time more closely linked to the Innovation Ecosystem Unit of the European Innovation Council (EIC).

With the signature of its Grant Agreement, the ATTRACT Phase 1B project will ramp up in full steam in the first quarter of next year. Aligned with the daunting challenges that Europe will face in the coming years related to climate change, it will focus on breakthrough technologies capable of collecting data (physical, chemical, biological characteristics) with high specificity and extreme sensitivity whilst offering high spatial and temporal resolution and massive parallelism.

Special attention will be paid to accelerate integration capacity: miniaturisation, portability, seamless connectivity for data collection and transmission… The technologies will have to be suitable for pervasive, low cost, and low-power ICT systems (incl. portable, wearable, IoT). In this way also, the project fully aligns with the European Commission Green Deal as well as reinforces the Green Village Initiative at CERN, which also be strongly ramping up in the first two quarters of next year.

Mandatory from the 1st of January 2022, all public bodies, research organisations or higher education institutions established in an EU Member State must have in place a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) “or equivalent” to be eligible for participation in Horizon Europe projects.

Already in line with the European Commission’s reinforced commitment toward gender equality, CERN Diversity & Inclusion and EU offices have developed the CERN GEP in a dedicated web page.

In July 2022, the Organization’s senior management have endorsed the GEP.

Read the CERN article on GEP here.

The Framework programme for research and innovation continues to be attractive for many CERN teams across the organization: 46 proposals with the participation of CERN were submitted to different Horizon Europe programmes. With 21 proposals, the ERC remains the most popular programme for the CERN research community. The ERC, together with the Research Infrastructure Programme (7 proposals) and the Marie-Curie Programme (4 proposals), compose the Excellence Science Pillar of Horizon Europe, which is the main EU source of funding for fundamental research, and hence has been the main focus of interest of the CERN community for nearly 10 years. In addition to the projects where CERN participates as a beneficiary, there were also 34 Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship applications, submitted by individual researchers (a record number).

Other programmes, to which several proposals have been submitted, include the European Innovation Council (EIC) and the Widening Excellence part of Horizon Europe.

As regards the success rates, 30 out of 46 proposals have been evaluated so far. Out of the 30 evaluated proposals, 9 have been funded, which gives a success rate of 30%. This is quite good, taking into account that the average success rate of Horizon Europe programmes is around 15%, and that most of the proposals were submitted to highly competitive programmes such as the ERC, Marie-Curie and EIC. And then 3 of the evaluated proposals are ranked on a reserve list, which means that they still have a chance of being funded, provided that some additional budget becomes available. The 34 individual Marie-Curie proposals are all still under evaluation.

Out of the 46 proposals, 19 have been submitted by CERN and 27 by other institutes. It is to be noted that 16 out of the 19 proposals submitted by CERN are ERC grant proposals. In other words, the number of projects where CERN took the lead of a consortium and submitted a proposal for a new EU project together with a number of other participants, has been quite low, and that has not been the case in previous years. 

Out of the 9 successfully evaluated proposals (so far), 1 is coordinated by CERN: HEARTS, a project for providing European industry with access to high-energy accelerators for radiation shielding and testing, which was funded under the Space programme of the Digital and Industry Cluster of Horizon Europe.

With 16 proposals under evaluation, there are still hopes for some other successful Horizon Europe projects among those that were submitted in 2022.

In 2023, the new cycle of Horizon Europe programmes (covering 2023-2024) will start. There will be multiple opportunities for EU support to CERN programmes and projects, including new initiatives such as the Green Village and the CIPEA programme. The EU Office welcomes for discussion and provides advice to everyone who has ideas for new projects and is looking for EU funding for this purpose.

The announcement was done during the ceremony of the prestigious Digital Preservation Awards at the iPres 2022 conference, held in Glasgow, UK. The Digital Preservation Awards  are the most prominent celebration of achievement for those people and organisations who have made significant contributions towards a sustainable future for our digital assets.

ARCHIVER was announced finalist for the Award for Collaboration and Cooperation in June 2022. The Award celebrates significant collaboration across institutional, professional, sectoral and geographical boundaries which have had a demonstrable and positive impact on digital preservation.

An Horizon 2020 project, ARCHIVER - Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments - will introduce significant improvements in the area of archiving and digital preservation services, supporting the IT requirements of European scientists and providing end-to-end archival and preservation services, cost-effective for data generated in the petabyte range with high, sustained ingest rates, in the context of scientific research projects. It project is managed by a consortium of procurer research organisations (CERN, DESY, EMBL-EBI and PIC) and experts (Addestino and Trust-IT).

"On behalf of CERN and the ARCHIVER partners, I would to thank the DPC and the Preservation community for this moment and great recognition. It has been a long journey that started back in 2019 (since then the world changed just a little bit...) And yes ARCHIVER indeed embodies the spirit of what Collaboration and Cooperation means i) Across different domains of science, ii) Across different regions in Europe and UK, iii) And of course between the public and the private sector with SME producing competitively high quality software and services designed for Big Science that will certainly commoditise the benefits of digital preservation across. There is a "before ARCHIVER" and "after ARCHIVER" for LTDP in science.

Thank you very much to the EC and all that contributed to this effort and let's now build what comes next on it!"

Joao Fernandes, ARCHIVER Coordinator

 From the Award application:

The work accomplished in ARCHIVER is a game-changer for the approach taken to long-term research data management both from a mindset and technological perspective, i.e. what data do researchers retain, how to keep intellectual control of it and what data stewards must do to ensure long-term value can be realised from it. The social importance and economic benefits of making scientific data open and reusable according to FAIR principles (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable) have already been demonstrated. However, there are still major gaps when it comes to the sustainability of long-term accessibility and usability of research data, for example as discussed in the FAIR Forever report from the Digital Preservation Coalition DPC).

These gaps put data at long-term risk, they prevent the construction and operation of sustainable Trusted Digital Repositories services, and they affect organizations both large and small who are tasked with being custodians of valuable research artefacts.

The ARCHIVER selected companies are promoting solutions that are environmentally sustainable, providing the means to analyse and reduce the carbon footprint as an aid towards carbon neutrality. As service providers, the consortia led by Arkivum and Libnova can support a range of organizations to take steps to respond to this urgent global challenge, aligning the innovative R&D produced with initiatives such as the Code of Conduct for Data Centres and the more recent Green Public Procurement criteria part of the Green Deal.

These are the aspects the ARCHIVER project has set out to solve by selecting these European SME companies with expertise in open data, archiving and data preservation to develop innovative solutions.

Originality of projects, autonomy of action and willingness to take risks – this is what motivated Magdalena Kowalska, a CERN staff member at ISOLDE, to apply for EU funding at CERN. Not just any projects; her focus is on the ones that allow researchers to fully deploy their ingenuity. This year, the Polish scientist who spent over 20 years at the Organization, has been awarded a new grant from the European Research Council (ERC). With this, she has become the only one among her CERN peers to have received two such grants.

Magdalena's journey can be a good starting point for potential candidates to European projects. Unlike the projects that bring together a consortia of ten, twenty or even forty members on broad themes, ERC projects are much more flexible and highlight the innovative work of a small team of researchers. "This is one of the only truly bottom-up European programmes - one that gives voice to fundamental research and cross-disciplinary approaches," explains Magdalena. Familiar with interdisciplinary work through her role as ISOLDE's physics coordinator and scientific secretary, she has been able to learn from the hundreds of annual users of the facility and in particular from the links between physics and biology.

Eager to open up to new horizons, Magdalena obtained her first ERC project back in 2015 to explore the use of unstable isotopes in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Called BetaDropNMR, this “Starting Grant” project received sufficient funding to finance her salary as CERN LD staff, a post-doc, and PhD student with equipment funding from CERN and thus start building her own research team. "The main advantage of such funding is that it gives researchers a large degree of scientific freedom - this is particularly interesting for those working in large collaborations," she adds.

From one project to the next. In last April, she again got selected for an ERC grant. This time, it is PresOBEN, a fundamental research “Consolidator Grant” project looking at the detailed structure of unstable nuclei. Magdalena emphasises the intense preparatory work that led to this second success: “It is important to secure the foundations: to have a solid proof of principle via simulations or experiments, to build on recent publications and to demonstrate how the impact of past successes can be vastly increased by the funding. Above all, one must show that the project is original and risky but feasible, timely, and that you’re a unique person to carry it out”. Obtaining such funding is not a guarantee and a certain amount of imagination may be necessary to plan for contingencies, bring together partners with complementary expertise, and of course adapt the presentation for the selection panel.

ERC grants are not the only funding that have enabled Magdalena to move her projects forward. There are many seed-funding opportunities for CERN personnel such as the Knowledge Transfer Fund and the Medical Applications (MA) budget which help launch projects in their early phase. The latter enabled the GammaMRI project to have first results and, thus, get selected for funding under Horizon 2020's Future and Emerging Technologies, the programme's high-risk / high-gain funding scheme (now replaced by EIC Pathfinder). Magdalena is now also starting an MA project on an innovative Nuclear Magnetic Resonance technology (RD-ZULF-NMR).

From quantum-resistant cryptography to advanced robotics, from two-dimensional materials to extreme data mining, a dozen Horizon Europe calls have been identified by CERN’s EU Projects Office as of potential interest for the organisation. If you are considering EU funding for your R&D projects, please do not hesitate to subscribe to the “EU projects @ CERN” Newsletter, to register for the dedicated training and to contact the EU Office.

Started one year and half ago, the Horizon Europe Programme has generated a lot of interest from the CERN community. So far, the Organization has been involved in more than 60 proposals, if we exclude the individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships. Success is clear. With over 30% of its projects selected of funding, CERN is doing very well compared to the average Horizon Europe rate, which stands around 15%.

As was the case in the previous EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation, most popular with our scientists and engineers are the European Research Council (ERC) Grants, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) and Research Infrastructure (RI) programmes. 13 of the 19 successful projects will be funded under one of these three programmes. This success includes 4 ERC Grants hosted by CERN and the Muon Collider Design Study, coordinated by CERN, which was recently selected for funding.

While these three programmes have been traditionally very popular and successful for CERN, a somewhat worrying trend is the declining interest in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks, in particular those where CERN takes the lead. In the latest issue of the “EU Projects @ CERN” newsletter, we took a dive into this programme specifically aimed at highly skilled doctoral candidates, to train them, stimulate their creativity, enhance their innovation capacities and boost their employability in the long-term.

On the positive side is the enhanced participation of CERN in other Horizon Europe programmes. Worth mentioning are one of our flagship projects, ATTRACT, whose Phase 1B will be funded by the European Innovation Council, and the HEARTS project, coordinated by CERN, which will be funded under the Digital, Industry and Space Cluster of Horizon Europe.

From quantum-resistant cryptography to advanced robotics, from two-dimensional materials to extreme data mining, a dozen Horizon Europe calls have been identified by CERN’s EU Projects Office as being of potential interest for the organisation. If you are considering EU funding for your R&D projects, please do not hesitate to visit the CERN EU Projects website and contact the EU Office, for a discussion, advice or opinion, and support in the preparation of the proposal.

Within Horizon Europe, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) aim to support researchers from all over the world on their doctoral education and postdoctoral training. With a budget of €6.6 billion (2021-2027) the MSCA aim to support 65,000 researchers including 25,000 PhDs in four types of funding opportunities.

Doctoral Networks (DN) aim to implement doctoral programmes by partnering with organisations from different sectorsacross Europe and beyond (universities, research institutions, research infrastructures, business including SMEs). For students, the programme helps stimulate their creativity, enhance their innovation capacities and boost their employability in the long-term.

The selection procedure for Doctoral Network is open, transparent and merit-based. The 2022 call will recruit around 10 MSCA doctoral students.

The Post Doctoral Fellowship supports researchers’ careers and foster excellence in research. This deadline to apply is 14 September.

Staff Exchanges supports collaboration and staff exchange between existing research institutions.

Cofund provides support for an existing doctoral or dost-doctoral programme.

To know more on Who and How to apply and how to manage your project, please consult the EC portal website and the Work Programme 2021-2022.

For any advice on MSCA, please contact Ingrid Haug ingrid.haug@cern.ch