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Ivana Víšová from the Optics Division has won the second place in the prestigious Werner von Siemens Award for her dissertation thesis “The study on interactions of functional surfaces with biological systems”. She has received two other prizes for it: the Bolzano Award awarded by Charles University, and the Visegrád Group Academies Young Researcher Award. In spite of her success in physics, her journey to it wasn’t completely straight; she wanted to become an Egyptologist, and Egypt has remained her grand passion until today.

He likes to play with light, to put it bluntly.  Jakub Dostálek, who is the latest acquisition of the Optics Division, focuses on investigating material properties and how they affect light. Or the other way round – how light affects material properties and the ways to control such properties using light. Having worked for over ten years abroad, he is now taking his first steps to return to Czechia.

One of the winners of the 24th annual Werner von Siemens Awards is the promising researcher Bruno de la Torre from the Institute of Physics and the Palacky University in Olomouc. The Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences is also home to the first place winner in the best dissertation category Petr Hauschwitz and the second place winner Ivana Víšová.

Nataliya Kazachková lost both her university office and home. The bombing of Kharkiv turned her life upside down, but the tenacious scientist did not give up. Together with her parents and younger daughter she managed to leave Ukraine, and thanks to the programme of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic “Researchers at Risk Fellowships - Ukraine”, since April she has been working at the Institute of Physics.

Unique Cherenkov telescopes have successfully been installed at the Ondřejov Observatory near Prague. There are two telescopes at the site, which are now the largest optical telescopes in the Czech Republic. They have been developed in the frame of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, and evaluated as performing telescopes in the high energy region above 1 TeV.

“We had the opportunity to invest time into interdisciplinary research, knowing that if everything works according to plan, we‘ll rank among the best. But an overarching element of our research remains to be optics – we’ve never run away from it,” says Alexandr Dejneka, the Optics Division Head, in an interview. 

Minister Gazdík had the opportunity to talk to the representatives of ELI research teams in the laser and experimental halls. The head of the centre, Roman Hvězda, informed minister Gazdík about the history of the construction and the commissioning of unique research technologies and about current activities for research users.

The atomically sharp domain walls that were discovered by an international team led by researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, might considerably improve the research of ulta-fast memory devices made from antiferromagnetic materials.