The UNESCOS project explores new frontiers for condensed matter physics: the interplay between new states of matter and superconductivity in strongly correlated electron systems. Unlocking this fundamental issue will provide materials scientists with new insights on how to design and produce new superconductors operating at higher temperature. This line of research will ultimately lead to technological breakthrough, new and more efficient avenues to produce, store and transmit electricity. Dealing with the enigmatic “pseudogap” state out of which high temperature superconductivity emerges in the phase diagram of cuprate superconductors, UNESCOS focuses on the study of unconventional charge density instabilities and aim to develop the concept of unconventional superconductivity driven by quantum criticality. The UNESCOS project is a jointed research program involving physicists from LNCMI, LLB and IPhT, whose works have received an important visibility in the last few years, bringing new concepts to this field: (i) Fermi surface reconstruction and stabilization of a charge density wave order under magnetic field, (ii) observation of an intra-unit-cell magnetic order in the pseudogap state using polarized neutron scattering technique, (iii) condensations of new phases, potentially responsible for the pseudogap state, induced by antiferromagnetic quantum fluctuations. Taken separately these works may seem to promote different and apparently conflicting physical pictures. The UNESCOS project takes up the challenge to bridge together phenomena, previously supposed unrelated and promote the emergence of a unified theoretical picture within the framework of a new theory for the pseudogap state implying a multicomponent order parameter mixing a quadrupolar density wave order and d-wave superconductivity. This new, controlled and predictive theory will be developed and specific calculations will be performed to predict and explain new experimental observations that will be carried out within the project. Indeed the theoretical work will be performed in synergy with thermodynamic (sound velocity), diffraction and spectroscopy (neutron and X-ray) measurements providing key information on the microscopic nature and symmetry of the anomalous electronic phenomena. These experiments will require technologies that are available only in large facilities (Neutron source, Synchrotron, High-Magnetic-Field laboratory).

We propose the development of a new generation of an integrated ion source system for the production of very pure radioactive ion beams at low energy, including isomeric beams. This ion source is also, in its own right, an experimental tool for laser spectroscopy. The Rare Elements in-Gas Laser Ion Source and Spectroscopy device will be installed at the S3 spectrometer, currently under construction as part of the SPIRAL-2 facility at the GANIL laboratory in Caen. Thus, REGLIS3 will be a source for the production of new and pure radioactive ion beams at low energy as well as a spectroscopic tool to measure nuclear hyperfine interactions, giving access to charge radii, electromagnetic moments and nuclear spins of exotic nuclei so far not studied. It consists of a gas cell in which the heavy-ion beam coming from S3 will stopped and neutralized, coupled to a laser system that assures a selective re-ionisation of the atoms of interest. Ionization can be performed in the gas cell or in the gas jet streaming out of the cell. A radiofrequency quadrupole is added to capture the photo-ions and to guide them to the low-pressure zone thereby achieving good emittance of the produced low-energy beam that will be sent to a standard measurement station. Owing to the unique combination of such a device with the radioactive heavy ion beams from S3, a new realm of unknown isotopes at unusual isospin (N/Z ratio, refered to as exotic isotopes) will become accessible. The scientific goals focus on the study of ground-state properties of the N=Z nuclei up to the doubly-magic 100Sn and those of the very heavy and superheavy elements even beyond fermium. Once routine operation is achieved the beams will be used by a new users community as e.g. decay studies and mass measurements. The goal of the proposal is to develop this new, efficient, and universal source for pure, even isomeric, beams and for pioneering high-resolution laser spectroscopy that will overcome the present experimental constraints to study very exotic nuclei.

Laterites are deep weathering covers of the critical zone that occupy 80% of the total soil-mantle volume of the Earth’s landscape and significantly participate to the global geochemical budget of weathering and erosion, and greenhouse gas consumption. Despite their factual importance on Earth surface, the timing of their formation and evolution in response to climatic and geodynamic forcing are still obscure. RECA project will address both the topics of "Functioning and evolution of climate, oceans and major cycles" and "Continental Surfaces: critical zone and biosphere" from ANR Axis 1 – Challenge 1., by reconstructing the influence of climate change laterites formation. The originality of the RECA project is to combine chronometric, weathering and climatic proxies developed in the recent years in order to build a comprehensive and predictive scenario of laterite formation and evolution. We will concentrate our effort on geodynamically stable Guyana Shield and Central Amazonia regions, where laterites formed through the whole Cenozoic and can be associated with major geomorphological units. This ambitious multidisciplinary project proposes, for the first time, to perform absolute dating of lateritic duricrusts associated to five episodes of planation in the South American subcontinent. We will date mineralogically well-identified populations of iron oxides and oxyhydroxides (hematite, goethite) and clays (kaolinites) by using (U-Th)/He, (U-Th)/Ne and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, respectively. These recent methods are appropriates because they can be applied to the most common secondary minerals found in laterites and span geological time scales. The inherent complexity of weathering materials, which may contain different populations of a same secondary mineral related to distinct stages of lateritization will be taken into account. The timing of duricrust formation will then be related to paleoclimatic conditions (temperature, rainfall) derived from a combination of geochemical or mineralogical indices and proxies: (i) at global scale, through, e.g., the known continental drainage curves; (ii) at a more regional scale through the intensity of weathering, the ratio hematite/goethite or O and H isotope systems of kaolinite and iron oxides and oxyhydroxides. A second task will associate non-conventional Li, Si and Fe isotopic methods that will help to decipher the evolution of weathering processes linked to the various stages of laterite formation. Coupling weathering budget and the ages of weathering profiles will yield average weathering and erosion rates, allowing comparison with other weathering environments or paleo-environments at the Earth surface. To tackle this ambitious task, the RECA project gathers an international consortium made of skilled researchers in the identification of lateritic soils, dating methods, environmental mineralogy; "traditional" and "non-traditional" stable isotope geochemistry, and modeling approaches of the formation of weathering profiles. The synergy of the identified teams offers the highest level of guarantee to lift off the identified scientific and technical barriers, giving access to yet hidden information on soil formation as a response to climate change through geological times.

For decades we have tried to explain the value of the Higgs boson mass in terms of symmetry. We have expected new symmetries and the new particles realizing them, to appear, first at LEP, then at the Tevatron and finally at the LHC. After more than 40 years we have not observed them and the origin of the scale of weak interactions remains mysterious. In this proposal I argue for a complete change of perspective on the problem. The origin of the weak scale can be found at early times in the history of the Universe, but it leaves non-trivial traces in the laboratory today. I discuss how the value of the Higgs boson mass can be tied to the evolution of the Universe, developing a program to fully explore the experimental consequences of this possibility. The impact of such a change of perspective is far reaching: it changes sharply our understanding of the origin of the weak scale. It offers a completely new motivation for current and future cosmological experiments. The impact is profound also on the high energy physics experimental program since this class of ideas points to a number of new experiments and signatures, ranging from probes of long-range forces to new signatures at the LHC and at future colliders.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN explores the frontier of particle physics by colliding protons. Quarks and gluons are abundantly produced in high-energy collisions and are a major handle to probe fundamental interactions and discover new physics. Practically, quarks and gluons are observed in the form of collimated showers of particles, called jets. We have established the current framework to reconstruct jets at the LHC. With the higher energies reached at the LHC, massive objects such as W/Z or Higgs bosons or the top quark can be produced boosted, that is with an energy much larger than their mass. When they decay via strong interactions, their decay products will be collimated, and they will be seen as a single jet. This is a shift from the standard paradigm where a "jet" is now a proxy for more than just a quark or a gluon. To maximise the LHC potential one must be able to isolate the rare boosted jets coming from the decay of massive objects from the much more frequent quarks and gluons. This is achieved by exploiting the substructure of the jets, i.e. the properties of their constituents. Jet substructure has been a growingly active field of research during Run I of the LHC, with many methods proposed, mainly by the theory part of the community, and many validations and measurements performed on the experimental side. Today, we therefore have evidence that jet substructure techniques work and help in identifying boosted jets. Currently, the methods are usually proposed and tested numerically, based on event simulated using Monte-Carlo event generators. This empirical approach suffers from severe limitations: it does not explain why a method works better than another; it makes it hard and time-consuming to explore vast parameter spaces and extrapolate across a wide energy range; it does not allow for robust estimations of the theoretical uncertainties; it does not explain subtle differences between Monte-Carlo simulations and actual experimental data and, above all, it shines no light on how to improve existing techniques. The objective of this project is to alleviate the above limitations by providing a first-principle understanding of jet substructure based on the theory of strong interactions. First, this means understanding existing techniques analytically. Our major goals are then to use this understanding to (i) develop new, optimised, jet substructure methods and (ii) provide precise calculations to estimate the theoretical uncertainties and gauge the robustness of each method. The analytic approach that we will use has been proven very successful in preliminary studies. This also means that our project is not only feasible but also very promising. Besides the main, crucial, application to boosted-objects identification, this project can also have more generic implications on optimisation of final-state information at the LHC such as pileup mitigation or jet vetoes. Furthermore, we shall also provide high-quality open-source software implementations of our tools in order to make them easily accessible by the relevant scientific community. Altogether, our project will bring the field of jet substructure to a new level. It will set the framework of this rapidly growing field for the next decade and beyond. This has an impact on a broad range of analyses at the LHC and will improve its discovery potential. The experience of the members of this team in jet physics puts us in a unique position to achieve our goals.