Call for proposals for access to integrated multidisciplinary facilities for Materials and Biomaterials

CERIC-ERIC offers access through a single entry point to more than 60 different and complementary state of the art techniques and support laboratories, distributed in 11 countries, with the submission of single or multi-technique proposals. A detailed description of the facilities available in CERIC can be found here.

Access to CERIC is open to scientists from all over the world and free of charge, provided the results end data are made available to the community in a reasonable time, according to our Scientific Data Policy.

Deadlines

• September 2nd 2024 at 17:00 CEST to have a pre-evaluation and the possibility to improve your proposal
• October 1st 2024 at 17:00 CEST final submission, recommended only for users that are expert in all the techniques requested.

How to apply

Proposals should be submitted online through the Virtual Unified Office (VUO), more information here. The best projects will be selected through international peer review.

Partial support for user’s mobility will be available for a maximum of two users through funding provided to CERIC from the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research. Read the policy here.

What is new in this call

CERIC is increasing its capacities in the field of Energy Materials. To this end, three energy storage facilities with state-of-the-art techniques in the field of fuel cells and batteries research, have been recently included in CERIC open access offer:

• European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Battery Energy Storage Testing Laboratory in Petten, The Netherlands
• European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Fuel Cell and Electrolyser Testing Laboratory in Petten, The Netherlands
• Hydrogen Technology Centre (HTC) at Charles University in Prague

After almost a year, the  PRP@CERIC Inelastic Ultraviolet Scattering with fixed-energy sources (IUVS-Offline) lab at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste is available again in the CERIC offer. The equipment of the laboratory has been enriched of the new Lab Model Deep UV Resonance Raman & Photoluminescence Spectrometer (excitation wavelength at 248 nm with microscopic imaging).

A new beamline for multimodal X-ray microimaging and microspectroscopy, PolyX, is available at SOLARIS National Synchrotron Radiation Centre in Krakow.

CERIC continues to offer access to

• AMS-IRMS Accelerator Mass Spectrometry for radiocarbon dating at the CEDAD laboratory of the University of Salento, Italy
• European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Nanobiotechnology Laboratory in Ispra, Italy
• Next Generation Sequencing at the Laboratory for Genomics and Epigenomics (LAGE) in Trieste, Italy

Maintenance

For maintenance reasons the ion beam facilty at the Ruđer Bošković Institute will not be offering access during the current Call for proposals to their laboratory, therefore the instruments IRRA, NMicro and ToF-ERDA will not be available, while RBSc and PIXE/RBS will be available at the CEDAD laboratory in Lecce.

The Thermal Neutron Three-axis Spectometer (TAST) at the Budapest Neutron Centre is currently out of service and will not be available in the current Call for Proposals.

The Gas Phase Photoemission (GAPH) beamline at Elettra Sincrotrone  is currently under extraordinary maintenance, therefore is not available in the current Call for Proposals.

Multi-technique proposals

For the following synchrotron beamlines, only multi-technique proposals will be considered:

• BAEL – Band Dispersion and Electron-Phonon Coupling
• ESCA – Esca Microscopy
• GAPH – Gas Phase Photoemission
• SUES – High Resolution Core-level Photoemission Spectroscopy
• MCX – Materials Characterisation by X-ray Diffraction
• NASP – Nanospectroscopy
• TwinMic – Soft X-ray Transmission and Emission Microscope
• SPEM – Spectromicroscopy
• SISSI-Bio – Synchrotron Infrared Source for Spectroscopy and Imaging (Chemistry & Life Sciences)
• SISSI-Mat – Synchrotron Infrared Source for Spectroscopy and Imaging (Materials science)
• SYRMEP – Synchrotron Radiation for Medical Physics
• XAFS – X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy
• XRD1 – X-ray Diffraction

Two-steps application

The first step allows a pre-evaluation of the proposal at the facilities, followed by two weeks for editing before final submission at the second deadline. Although we suggest taking advantage of the pre-evaluation, expert users may decide to submit their proposals directly at the second deadline.

Fast track access

Read the CERIC Scientific Data Policy here

CERIC user office: useroffice@ceric-eric.eu