The project will boost a new generation of experiments designed to identify a much sought-after paradigm of chiral superconductivity. Chiral superconductivity is central for most applications of topological superconductivity. Besides time-reversal symmetry breaking, chirality in the superconducting state has many predicted signatures. The most prominent are the existence of zero energy excitations (Majorana modes) at interfaces. They lead to thermal edge currents, to a quantized thermal Hall effect, and to half quantized vortices. An anomalous bulk thermal transport is also expected from the low energy chiral thermal excitations. The challenge is to combine bulk thermal transport experiments and local microscopic measurements sensitive to edge thermal currents or to the flux quantization of vortices. The project is carried by three French teams, gathering strength from their complementary expertise. They will considerably improve the sensitivity of their experimental techniques, and perform these measurements on a family of uranium-based superconductors. These systems have been chosen because they are prime candidates for chiral superconductivity, and offer the rare opportunity to test the different responses predicted according to their precise superconducting order parameter symmetry. A German team (with no request for ANR support) will also collaborate on this project, for micro-patterning by focused ion beam etching of the uranium-based crystals.

The production of high performance metallic materials is a strategic challenge for the European metallurgy with the aim of efficiently competing with emerging market economies. In this respect, inclusion cleanliness is a major challenge, since it strongly influences the mechanical performance of metallic alloys, and can reduce the weight of metallic parts. Ladle treatment of liquid metal by gas injection has been pointed out for a long time as the processing stage mainly responsible for the inclusion cleanliness of steels, aluminium alloys and speciality steels. In these reactors, inclusions are recovered by the combination of settling and flotation. Such processes aim at both, depleting the population of inclusions and controlling the size of the biggest remaining inclusions. The first objective benefits from inclusion aggregation because bigger aggregates are more easily eliminated by sedimentation and flotation, but the need to limit the inclusion size imposes a strict upper bound to this process. Optimizing operating conditions to provide well balanced aggregation kinetics is a key issue to guarantee process efficiency and cleanliness of the cast liquid. In spite of their critical impact on industrial operations, aggregation mechanisms of inclusions in liquid metal are still not fully understood, nor adequately captured by correlations that could be used in process modeling and design due to their inherent complexity. This lack of knowledge furthermore results from the complexity of experiments with liquid metals, as well as from the multi-scale nature of the problem which makes it impossible for state-of-the-art simulations to capture all the physics at once. FLOTINC addresses these two bottlenecks by an innovative multi-scale concept dedicated to the fundamental aspects of the aggregation dynamics of inclusions during flotation. It combines the two decisive scales, the scale of bubbles and bubble groups on one hand and the scale of inclusions and inclusion interactions on the other hand. This is made possible by four teams joining forces, two teams of experimentalists and two teams of simulation specialists, each employing recent cutting-edge technologies developed by the respective researchers. At the small scale, collaborative experiments and simulations are conducted, and the same is done on the large scale. The link between inclusion aggregation and bubbly flow conditions is mainly established by the simulations. They allow local properties of the larger scales to be used as input for the smaller scales, while resolution of the processes on the small scales provides sub-models for the large scales. In this way, the wide spectrum of coupled physical mechanisms at different scales can be captured as a whole. Physical analyses will provide new and valuable information on aggregation and flotation in metallurgical processes and on strategies for their control. The experimental and numerical results will be expressed in the form of statistical kernels, that will provide industries and further research with quantitative aggregation models. These will be applicable to a wide variety of metallurgical processes and substantially improve the predictive capacity of simulations on the industrial scale. Addressing the industrial challenge of inclusion cleanliness, this project perfectly matches the axis “Matériaux et Procédés” of the challenge “Stimuler le renouveau industriel”

With more than 10 million people affected worldwide, Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases with major psychological, social and economic impacts. PD is characterized by the progressive degeneration of the nigrostriatal dopamine (DA) pathway that innervates dopaminoceptive neurons of the dorsal striatum in the basal ganglia network. This results in the disconnection of the D1 dopaminoceptive neurons of the “direct pathway” in the dorsal striatum that physiologically facilitates the initiation of voluntary movements, resulting in akinesia. The current pharmacological approaches control the symptoms in the early phase, but still suffer from some long-term complications and drug-resistance issues, while alternative methods (deep brain stimulation, optogenetics) present high levels of invasiveness. The NANOPHAGE project brings together expertise from seven research institutes across six different countries to tackle the development of innovative therapeutic strategies for PD. Here we propose the use of M13 engineered phages as nanocarriers for the specific targeting and activation of D1-dopaminoceptive neurons in the striatum. Phages will be conjugated to polymeric nanoparticles able to modulate neural activity upon light or ultrasound stimulation. With the proven capability of phage system to efficiently cross the blood brain barrier and by tuning the NPs properties to adsorb light in the near infrared, our method holds a great promise for an effective, cell-specific, minimally invasive strategy to drive activation of the direct pathway in vivo and rescue PD symptoms. This project will pave the way for a very flexible platform based on novel hybrid bio-nano interfaces applicable in vivo to rescue neural functions that are lost in neurodegenerative diseases.