ERC, the European Research Council, awards Fernando Ferroni for the studies on neutrinos’mass and Giorgio Parisi for the analisys of disordered systems. Fernando Ferroni has proposed Lucifer, Low-background Underground Cryogenic Installation for Elusive Rates, funded by Erc with euro 3.3 millions for a 5 years long project

Lucifer will study  the nature of neutrinos, the elementary particles playing a central role in subnuclear physics theories. In particular, it aims to establish neutrinos mass through zinc selenide crystal with a near the absolute zero temperature, joining together bolometric technique and scintillation light revelation. This procedure has to be undertaken in a place cut off  by sounds and radiations, that is the reason why the scientific experiment will be performed in Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics. It is the largest underground laboratory in the world for experiments in particle physics, particle astrophysics and nuclear astrophysics which is used by scientists with underground facilities located on a side of the ten kilometres long freeway tunnel crossing the Gran Sasso Mountain. The average 1400 m rock coverage gives a reduction factor of one million in the cosmic ray flux; moreover, the neutron flux is thousand times less than on the surface.

Giorgio Parisi has proposed CryPheRaSy, Critical Phenomena in Random Systems, funded by Erc  with euro 2 millions for a 5 years long project. CryPheRaSy aims to get a theoretical understanding of the most important large-scale phenomena in classical and quantum disordered systems. Thanks to the renormalization group approach, the critical behaviour of pure systems is under control. However disordered systems are remarkably peculiar (i.e. non-perturbative phenomena like Griffiths singularities), but many crucial issues are still unclear.
The project wants to fill this important hole in our understanding of disordered systems concentrating the efforts on some of the most studied systems, i.e. spin glasses, random field ferromagnets (that are realized in nature as diluted antiferromagnets in a field), Pursuing a new approach to these problems, professor Giorgio Parisi wants to compute in the most accurate way the properties of these systems using the original Wilson formulation of the renormalization group with a phase space cell analysis.