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Peter Ware Higgs, the British theoretical physicist known for his work on the Higgs boson and the Higgs mechanism, passed away on Monday 8 April at the age of 95.

Visitors to the exhibition of works created during the inaugural January workshop of the BeInspired project for lower and upper secondary school students, which aims to bridge the worlds of science and art, will find themselves in an artistic world inspired by elementary particle physics.

On Friday, March 8, scientists from the Institute of Physics explained the secrets of cosmic rays and how to measure them at the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina to nearly thirty high school students.

This year's prestigious Erwin Schrödinger Gold Medal was awarded to Professor Karl-Heinz Ernst for his pioneering contributions to fundamental and applied aspects of surface science, stereochemistry, chirality and nanomaterials. The medal was awarded in February at the XXIV Symposium on Atomic, Cluster and Surface Physics (SASP) in Andalo, Italy.

Controlling the chemical structure of matter at the atomic level with light seemed impossible until now. Now, scientists have developed a technique to control photochemical reactions at the level of individual molecules. An international team of researchers, including Tomáš Neuman from the Institute of Physics at CAS, has published a method for controlling molecular dynamics in Nature Nanotechnology. This breakthrough could open a new chapter in photochemistry research.

The Excellent Research call in the Johannes Amos Comenius Programme (P JAC) is one of the most important Czech grant calls with a total allocation of CZK 12.2 billion, which aims to enable Czech research to reach European and global excellence. The Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU) has achieved a significant success in this competition and will participate in the investigation of six projects out of the total of 26 projects that received funding in an extremely demanding evaluation process.

An international team of scientists, led by Czech physicists, has successfully developed a unique magnetic nanographene for the first time. They combined two concepts of magnetism and were the first to detect their magnetic signal using advanced scanning electron microscopy and quantum mechanical calculations. Graphene nanoparticles have the potential to be used for information storage and processing in quantum computing.

"A scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.” This quote by Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford could be applied to the recent achievements of Libor Šmejkal. He was selected from hundreds of nominated scientists to be awarded the Breakthrough Scientific Discovery of the Year 2023 title in the Falling Walls competition for his theoretical work on altermagnetism and non-dissipative nanoelectronics. He was able to explain his discoveries to the general public by comparing a new form of magnetism to the dance of swans. His scientific career illustrates the importance of the role of teachers and mentors and symbolises a commitment to discovery and contribution to scientific knowledge.

In an article published in Nature an international team of scientists breaks down the traditional idea of dividing magnetism into two branches – the ferromagnetic one, known for several millennia, and the antiferromagnetic, discovered about a century ago. Researchers have now succeeded in directly experimentally demonstrating a third altermagnetic branch theoretically predicted by researchers in Prague and Mainz several years ago.