The "Unicorn" project, presented by the research group of Sergio Brovelli, Professor at the Department of Materials Science at the University of Milan-Bicocca, has been awarded a budget of 3 million euros over four years by the European Innovation Council (EIC), as part of the prestigious "EIC Pathfinder Open 2022" frontier research funding, allocated by the European Community to promote the development of innovative technological solutions in various scientific fields.
Unicorn" ("Hybrid nanocomposite scintillators for transformational breakthroughs in radiation detection and neutrino research", translated: "Hybrid Nanocomposite Scintillators for Transformational Breakthroughs in Radiation Detection and Neutrino Research") is coordinated by the Milan Athenaeum and involves 6 other partners, academic institutions such as Cern in Geneva, the Italian Institute of Technology, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Basque BCMaterials Foundation, as well as leading start-ups in photonic nanotechnologies such as Nexdot in Paris and Glass to Power in Italy.
Specifically, 'Unicorn' aims to develop scintillation detectors - which emit light when interacting with radiation - based on colloidal quantum dots, which have just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and could be used in several strategic areas of radiation detection, including national security, medical diagnostics, environmental and industrial monitoring, clean energy production (particularly in future nuclear reactors), space exploration, and particle and high-energy physics.