In September 2021, the 32nd edition of the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) held in Salamanca, Spain assembled 158 promising young scientists aged 14 to 20, coming from 34 countries. EIROforum organisations awards a limited number of Special Donated Prizes to contestants who, according to the EUCYS Jury, would benefit from the specific experience that these prizes offer. CERN awards a one-week visit to the Laboratory and its experiences.
In June 2022, CERN welcomed two young German students, Leo Neff and Leonard Münchenbach, for a rich programme of visits to detectors, experiments, facilities and CERN’s S’cool LAB. Meetings with engineers, physicists, guides and computer scientists were a great opportunity for them to build network for their future careers.
Their project on “Physical description and modelling of paper strip flights” consists of using a formula to precisely calculate the phenomenon of the speed of the paper strips of a certain shape and size rotate when they fall. They constructed a frame and used slow-motion camera and computer software to investigate a wide variety of stripe shapes.
Both students, after their visit, are considering coming back to CERN to follow their scientific career.
The CERN Special Prize in the EU Contest for Young Scientists was awarded to two young German students for their project on “Physical description and modelling of paper strip flights”
The CERN EU office, the legal office and the external grants are getting together to give a complete training on all you wanted to know about EU funded projects.
With six modules, the training will teach you how to prepare and write an EU proposal, how to handle the project when funded, how to deal with all the legal and financial aspects and how to communicate about it.
The next session will take place online on 13-14 September 2022.
It takes years for a spinoff idea to leave the lab, mature and eventually hit the market, if ever. ATTRACT aims to develop a funding model to help diminish the time needed and increase the chances of great ideas leaving labs and directly benefiting society.
In its first phase, which focused on turning ideas into functional prototypes, ATTRACT supported 170 breakthrough ideas with €100 000 each in seed funding in order to create a proof-of-concept pool of ideas in detection and imaging. The pool includes drones capable of detecting pollution in the air, through to AR/VR aid for surgeons and new cryptographic methods.
During a kick-off meeting on 31 May 2022, ATTRACT presented the 18 R&D&I projects that it had selected from the 68 proposals in the proof-of-concept pool. The 18 projects have received between €500 000 and €2 000 000 each, depending on their start-end technology readiness level (TRL), to help them to move from a prototype to a pre-market product (risk mitigation phase).
The ATTRACT timeline, from ideas to solutions (Image: CERN)
One of the R&D&I projects selected for the second phase of ATTRACT is AHEAD, a project by CERN and five other partners, which proposes to develop a new way to manufacture components for the next generation of cooling systems. By combining 3D-printing technologies, AHEAD aims to produce cooling systems with a reduced number of components that are lighter, smaller and therefore able to be placed closer to areas that need to be cooled. Better performance for the complex cooling systems at CERN is an evident potential benefit. Furthermore, such technologies could also reduce fuel consumption in the aerospace industry. CERN will also study the extension of the potential application of the product to the market of natural refrigeration plants.
In addition to 18 R&D&I projects, a further 18 Academy projects and socioeconomic studies will also benefit from €28 million in EU funding.
“Incremental innovation will not be sufficient for addressing the upcoming societal challenges in the next decades. The ATTRACT project and methodology aim to accelerate the market uptake of breakthrough innovation”, says Pablo Garcia Tello, ATTRACT project coordinator and leader of the Development of EU Projects and Initiatives section at CERN.
The Academy call will run programmes for university students to generate ideas for social innovation inspired by the technologies developed within the R&D&I projects. Each student programme has received between €80 000 and €240 000.
Under the Socioeconomic Studies call, eight projects have received funding of €125 000 to conduct novel studies designed to gain new perspectives and enrich traditional impact metrics in order to evaluate the current working methods of ATTRACT and other European research infrastructures and innovation ecosystems and assess their impact on society.
For more information and to follow the development of the projects, please visit:
*ATTRACT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101004462.
**AHEAD is a consortium in which CERN collaborates with CSEM SA, Thales Alenia Space France, LISI Aerospace, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and InanoEnergy.
Advanced Heat Exchange Devices (AHEAD) is one of the R&D&I funded projects coordinated by the Swiss research and development centre CSEM in which CERN is part of the consortia. (Image: AHEAD)
ATTRACT is a European funded project whose goal is to develop next-gen scientific tools, co-create new business and market products, increase European companies’ competitiveness, and trigger more and better jobs for Europeans. (Image: ATTRACT)
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ATTRACT, a research and innovation project funded by the European Union and backed by a consortium of nine partners, including CERN, will commit €28 million to finance 36 projects from more than 20 countries
At CERN, are you in charge of organising an onsite or online event as part of an EU funded project? Here is where you can find inspiration for the data privacy notices that you need to share with the speakers and participants to your event. These data privacy notices were developed by the EU Office in the context of the ATTRACT project in collaboration with the CERN’s Office of Data Privacy.
The aim was to make them as generic as possible for reuse by other EU projects. However each project is specific so make sure to review them for the applicability and potential adaptations for your project.
Here below are the main four data privacy notices:
The harvest of Horizon Europe projects continues for CERN. A few months after announcing the selection of the first Horizon Europe projects with CERN participation, the European Commission announced the selection of the first project coordinated by the Organization, ATTRACT 1(B). This good news was quickly followed by the award of two ERC Consolidator Grants: one in the EP department and one in the TH department. The three projects will respectively address the transition of detection and imaging technologies from the lab to the market, give new perspectives on nuclear structure studies and help our understanding of complex collider events.
The ATTRACT Programme to be extended to Earth observation and monitoring
Following the success of the first ATTRACT project referred to as Phase 1(A) and the recent launch of Phase (2), the ATTRACT Consortium has been granted 5 Million Euros by the European Innovation Council (EIC) to replicate Phase 1(A) with a dedicate focus on Detection and Imaging (D&I) for Earth Observation and Monitoring. This ATTRACT Phase 1(B) will fund 30 breakthrough D&I concepts at €100.000 each. Consortia selected through an Open Call will have 12 months to investigate the scientific merits, technical feasibility, and potential game-changing applicability of their concept up to TRL level 3-5. Technologies should be capable of collecting data (physical, chemical, biological, etc.) with high specificity and extreme sensitivity whilst offering high spatial and temporal resolution and massive parallelism. They should be suitable for seamless integration into pervasive, low cost, and low-power ICT systems (incl. portable, wearable, IoT). The Open Call for proposals is scheduled to be launched during the autumn 2022 with the detailed information on the award and selection criteria.
Two new ERC Consolidator Grants to support fundamental research at CERN
The European Research Council (ERC) was established as the first-ever European programme for support to fundamental research. As one of the very few EU programmes which are truly bottom-up, the ERC has quickly become very popular with the particle physics community. Since the start of the programme in 2007, CERN has been hosting researchers of outstanding track-record thanks to such grants. “CERN is now proud to host the first ERC projects under Horizon Europe, which are two Consolidator Grants. These grants support world-class researchers who are consolidating their own research team and/or programme” explains Svetlomir Stavrev, Head of the EU Projects Management and Operational Support section at CERN.
Neutrons are fascinating particles but their electrical neutrality makes it difficult to learn about their distribution in nuclei. The ERC consolidator grant PreSOBEN aims to investigate this field by using a novel, high-accuracy experimental approach, combining radiation-detected Nuclear Magnetic Resonance with rf-laser double spectroscopy on optically-pumped short-lived nuclei produced at ISOLDE. “The project will involve a close collaboration with quantum-chemistry, atomic- and nuclear-physics theorists, who will use the data to improve their approaches. We hope that this will open new perspectives for nuclear structure studies, determination of neutron-star properties, or APV studies”, explains Dr. Magdalena Kowalska, PreSOBEN Project Coordinator. CERN is the only participant to this project which will run from 1 September 2022 for five years.
The future investigation of the fundamental laws of nature in collider experiments relies on the interpretation of complex scattering events by means of accurate theoretical calculations, which are instrumental to find small signals of elusive new phenomena. These calculations must describe the evolution of the system from the few particles produced in the high-energy phase of the collision to the tens or hundreds of low-energy particles observed in the detectors. “As an ERC consolidator grant, JANUS aims at transforming our understanding of such a multi-scale evolution. New innovative techniques will be developed to obtain state-of-the-art theoretical predictions in the important fields of Higgs and jet physics, enabling their optimal exploration at the LHC and future collider experiments”, explains Pier Francesco Monni, JANUS Project Coordinator. The project, that will start in the fall/winter 2022 for five years, will involve researchers at CERN and at the University of Bern.
From quantum-resistant cryptography to advanced robotics, from two-dimensional materials to extreme data mining, over twenty 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 visit the CERN EU Projects website and contact the EU Office.
The European Commission has recently approved funding for the first Horizon Europe projects coordinated by CERN, including two ERC grants hosted by the Organization.
The CERN EU office, the legal office and the external grants are getting together to give a complete training on all you wanted to know about EU funded projects.
With six modules, the training will teach you how to prepare and write an EU proposal, how to handle the project when funded, how to deal with all the legal and financial aspects and how to communicate about it.
The next session will take place online on 13-14 September 2022.
If you have not yet attended the “EU funded projects-demystified!” training or you are taking your first steps in the world of EU projects, you will be delighted to know that the finances of EU projects are centralized in the FAP department. There is a dedicated section, FAP-RPC-EG to help you from the budget of the proposal to the financial reporting to the EU. Composed of five people, this team has extensive experience on the finances of EU projects from FP6 (which ran from 2002 to 2006) to Horizon Europe (running until 2027) and works closely with the EU office.
You will not be facing this complicated funding programme alone, the team will support you all along the project duration, whatever CERN role in the action is, no matter what project you are involved in: ERC Grants, Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions, Research Infrastructure projects with Transnational Access activities or not, Pre-Commercial Procurement actions or Cascade funding grants… In charge of all financial reports and main contact in case of audits, the team, with the support of the Department Planification Officers (DPO), will implement the project budget in CERN tools, follow-up the expenses and issue the financial reports for you.
Do you have any questions on EU projects, such as what cost is eligible and what not? What is the difference between a contract and a subcontract for the EU? Who should fill timesheets and how? How are expenses reimbursed? How are other beneficiaries of the Consortium paid? What kind of supporting documents should be kept and how long? Just contact the team.
Video clip presenting the AIDAinnova project to collaborate on common detector projects in line with the European Strategy update. The video presents the project’s background and goals. The main focus was put on the main challenges behind detectors technologies and demonstrate the passion of scientists and engineers working on the project. (Video: CERN)
From medical imaging to weather forecasting, from airport security to art restoration, detectors in unexpected places are improving our daily lives.
Started in 2021, the CERN-coordinated AIDAinnova project aims to provide state-of-the-art upgrades to research infrastructures, such as test beams, in order to unfold the scientific potential of detector technologies. The project involves three RTOs (Research and Technology Organisations) and 34 academic institutions in 15 countries, in co-innovation for common detector projects, strengthening the competence and competitiveness of the industrial partners in other markets.
This includes exploration applications of novel technologies, increase of the efficiency and quality of the beam test and irradiation facilities, thus rendering European Industry ready for large series production of HEP detectors.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101004761.
Over the past five years, the ARIES (Accelerator Research and Innovation for European Science and Society) project has brought together 41 partners from academia and industry from 18 different European countries in the aim of developing key accelerator technologies to make present and future machines more efficient, affordable, reliable and sustainable.
Under the coordination of CERN, the project has been breaking new ground for the accelerator community, and this Horizon 2020-funded effort has now borne his fruits: the European ecosystem of accelerator centres is now stronger than ever, with easily accessible facilities, well-highlighted synergies and new plans to improve current technologies and infrastructures.
Video presentation of the ARIES project when it started as a new initiative to improve particle accelerators and make them more compact and easier to use outside research. (Video: CERN)
One of the project’s main endeavours was the facilitation of transnational access. In the aim of providing a wide range of European researchers and industry with access to top-class accelerator research and test infrastructures, ARIES set up a network of 14 accelerator test facilities across Europe. The programme allows users to carry out tests within five separate domains: magnet, material, electron and proton beam, radiofrequency, and plasma beam. With over 23 000 hours of testing for 307 users, the scheme generated interesting new science and expanded the project’s user community.
ARIES was critical in investigating and promoting new perspectives for accelerator research and development. It created a breeding ground for research in plasma and laser-based acceleration, a field now driven in Europe by EuPRAXIA, another promising EU-funded project. Furthermore, ARIES support was key in ensuring the continuation of initiatives such as studies on high-temperature superconductivity or the revival of the studies on muon colliders. In 2022, a prototype electron gun for electron lenses was assembled and tested by four ARIES collaborators, and breakthrough results were achieved in the fields of thin superconducting films and materials for extreme thermal management.
The use of accelerator to remove harmful emission from ship exhaust was a remarkable example of how society could profit from particle accelerator technologies.
Strong interaction with industry was promoted as a key objective. The project could benefit from an enhanced industrial participation, with the involvement of seven industries and one association, and ran three new co-innovation programmes with industry. It also identified and supported a wealth of technologies with societal and environmental applications, such as a particle accelerator system to remove harmful emission from ship exhaust.
With its mission now fulfilled, ARIES is now coming to a close. However, its succession is ensured thanks to two new projects: started in April 2021, I.FAST will continue and further advance on ARIES’ legacy of joint R&D activities with industry to develop ideas and technologies for the next generation of particle accelerators. In parallel, EURO-LABS will further the transnational access tradition of ARIES, bringing research centres even closer together by creating a new, synergetic network of research facilities for accelerator, detector and nuclear technologies.
In the aim of providing a wide range of European researchers and industry with access to top-class accelerator research and test infrastructures, ARIES set up a network of 14 accelerator test facilities across Europe.
(Image: CERN)
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The EU-funded ARIES project has succeeded in opening new avenues for the accelerator community
Since 2021, the EU-funded I.FAST project has been developing innovative technologies common to multiple accelerator platforms and defining strategic roadmaps for future development. Under CERN coordination, the community of 49 beneficiaries contributes to preparing for the next step of particle physics research, improving the sustainability of accelerator-based science and meeting the specific needs of societal applications.
The project’s Internal Innovation Fund (IIF) was created to stimulate the innovation in accelerator technologies. The primary objective of the fund is to encourage I.FAST beneficiaries to identify innovative solutions with viable industrial or commercial potential. This fast-track, competitive process will finance emerging technologies, processes, research, business models and other innovative solutions, at both development and prototype stages.
Technologies supported by the IIF shall be capable of advancing the state of the art in fields related to the I.FAST thematic areas. They shall also contribute to improving the sustainability of particle accelerator technologies, by reducing accelerators’ electricity consumption or footprint, by improving their performance for an equivalent impact, or by serving direct environmental purposes.
The thematic areas of interest include:
Novel particle accelerator concepts and technologies
High luminosity accelerators for light sources
Innovative superconducting magnets
Innovative superconducting thin film coated cavities
Advanced accelerator technologies and materials
Sustainable concepts and technologies
Societal applications
Technology Infrastructure
Individual projects will receive from 100 to 200 kEUR in funding until the exhaustion of the available fund (1.000.000 euro). The supported projects must include at least one I.FAST beneficiary and one industrial partner in their consortia.
To submit your proposal, complete the web submission form on the I.FAST website by September 15, 2022.
Find out more about the application process by visiting the I.FAST website or by contacting Marcello Losasso, the fund manager.
