Research

Remembering Mrs. Zdena Málková, a long-time secretary of the Magnetism Department, who left us unexpectedly just before Christmas.

A device to detect SARS-CoV-2 in saliva samples is one step closer to a real-world application.  A unique technology, which was developed by researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, has shown sensitivity comparable to that of PCR testing.

Václav Vrba, our classmate, friend and colleague passed away after a long illness on Tuesday, December 29. His life’s pilgrimage crossed ours in a number of places and for years in our working as well as personal lives and it is difficult for us to accept that it no longer will be so.

Researchers from Institute of Physics in collaboration with Lomonosov Moscow State University elaborated novel photocontrollable photonic crystals based on porous silicon filled with photochromic liquid crystalline mixture. In their recent joint paper, whose figure highlighted the back cover of the November issue of Advanced Optical Materials, they demonstrated that these photonic crystals have great potential for creation of photoswitchable materials for photonics applications.

The “red giants” are an interesting type of huge and bright stars for astronomers. They are considered old even from the cosmic perspective as they have been evolving over a long period of time. Surprisingly, there is only a few of them in the region near the centre of our Galaxy, where an increased presence of younger stars has been revealed instead. A study, proposing a process to explain this anomaly, co-authored by the researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences, has been published by The Astrophysical Journal.

A domain pattern with multiple polar domain walls in non-polar CaTiO₃ from a review article: “Domain-wall engineering and topological defects in ferroelectric and ferroelastic materials” highlighted the front cover of the November issue of Nature Reviews Physics.

Magnetoelectric multiferroic are materials where the ferroelectric and magnetic ordering can coexist and be mutually coupled. This phenomenon is called magnetoelectric coupling and can in principle be used to improve magnetoelectric memories or other electric-field-controlled spintronic or magnonic devices. Unfortunately, there are a relatively small number of single-phase multiferroics in nature and their magnetoelectric coupling is lower than needed for many applications.

Czech scientists in collaboration with their colleagues from Spain introduced a new type of polymers which have been unavailable by means of traditional methods applied so far. This polymer type could play an important part in the design of new components for nanoelectronics, such as new displays.