Research

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. 

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.

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). 

Less than 5% of the Universe is made of normal, visible matter; the rest is dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%).  No wonder then that understanding the bigger fraction of matter is a fundamental goal of astrophysics and cosmology. Federico Urban from FZU got an EEA and Norway grant to foster international collaboration on several aspects of dark matter.

The new record in multibeam laser nanostructuring, with respect to the number of laser beams simultaneously modifying the material surface, was reached due to the active scientific cooperation of HiLASE Centre with the Israeli company HOLO/OR Ltd.

HiLASE Centre as a part of the Institute of Physics of the CAS has achieved another world record. The Laser Micromachining team led by Peter Hauschwitz, applied a concept of multi beam processing of record speed of 1909 cm²/min to create nanostructures on stainless steel.