Research

Swapping your left shoe for the right one while putting them on is unpleasant, but swapping molecules in the same way when making medicines can be fatal - instead of a drug poison is produced. A new method invented by a team of international scientists led by Lukas Palatinus from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences will help prevent this. The unique procedure for determining the position of atoms in crystals was published last week in the Nature Chemistry journal.

In an ambitious project, Tim Verhagen, a Dutch scientist at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, aims to create a new type of material that will have simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric properties at room temperature. The project, which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), involves the deposition of very thin, single-atomic layers of different materials on top of each other to create so called “2D sandwich".

Water pollution is endangering more lives annually than all forms of violence and war. Accessible sources of clean water are limited. Less than 1 percent of the planet's freshwater is available to us. The international Aqua3S project proposes innovative solutions to water facilities, as well as the standardization of current existing sensor technologie.

In HiLASE Centre, a new generation of diode-pumped lasers with high average power and high repetition frequency has been developed for a long time. We talked to Jan Brajer, a leading expert from the HiLASE Centre, about colours of the laser as well as success in laser shock peening.

RNDr. Mariana Klementová, Ph.D., head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory, is interested in the characterization of inorganic materials at the micro to nanoscale and in 3D electron diffraction to determine the atomic structure of unknown crystalline substances.