News

We are happy to announce that the BIVOJ laser system is once again a record holder in its performance class. This is BIVOJ's second world record this year and the third overall. Earlier this month the high energy output from BIVOJ was converted (via second harmonic frequency conversion) to 515 nm wavelength pulses with an energy of more than 68 J at a repetition rate of 10 Hz, which at the time of writing is the world's highest average power in the category of high energy (>1 J), high average power lasers.

Until now, observing subatomic structures was beyond the resolution capabilities of direct imaging methods, and this seemed unlikely to change. Czech scientists, however, have presented a method with which they became the first in the world to observe an inhomogeneous electron charge distribution around a halogen atom, thus confirming the existence of a phenomenon that had been theoretically predicted but never directly observed. 

On September 28, 2021, at the age of 82, our former colleague prom. Josef Holakovský, CSc. passed away. After graduating from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague as a theoretical physicist, he joined the Department of Dielectrics in 1968 and ten years later defended his dissertation "Ferroelectric and Antiferroelectric Phase Transition of the Order Type in Mixed Crystals", submitted in 1973).

The terahertz spectroscopy group of Petr Kužel in collaboration with the Charles University described nonlinear behavior of charge carriers during early times after pulsed optical excitation in epitaxially grown graphene layers. The time evolution of the system is determined by nonlinear electronic response of graphene, which opens the possibility of the increase of the speed of optoelectronic elements. The results the study were published in a prestigious journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Researchers of the Czech Academy of Sciences succeeded in the second year of the JUNIOR STAR competition of the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) and made up a half of the total number of supported 16 projects. This year from our institute, it was Prokop Hapala and Dominik Kriegner who succeeded in the big competition for grants. The Institute of Physics and the Czech Technical University thus have two awarded scientists, and came after the Masaryk University, which won three projects.

The Becquerel Prize is the confirmation of Petra Kubíčková’s extraordinary achievements in science. The highest award given by the French Embassy in Prague in the category for Ph.D. students in the field of nuclear research was presented to a fresh Ph.D. by the Nobel Prize winner Jean-Maria Lehne and the French Ambassador Alexis Dutertre. The award ceremony, where twenty-three prizes in seven competition categories were awarded, took place at the Buquoy Palace at the end of September.

Targeted drug delivery is a topic of interest to scientists around the world. A new contribution to this area has now been made by researchers from the Laboratory of Biophysics led by Oleg Lunov from the Division of Optics. The group was exploring biological properties and the efficiency of cellular delivery using DNA nanostructures (DN). 

The Nobel Committee has decided to award this year's Nobel Prize for pioneering contributions to the general understanding of complex systems. Half of the prize went to prof. Giorgi Parisi of La Sapienza University in Rome for his discovery of the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.