Research

The FerrMion project focuses on research and development of technical applications of ferroic materials, such as ferroelastic alloys with shape memory or multiferroics combining unique electrical, magnetic and mechanical properties. The planned research covers a broad spectrum of physical and technical fields and promises applications in energy, medicine and robotics. As part of the project, a unique 3D atomic probe material characterisation facility, the first of its kind in the Czech Republic, will be commissioned on the premises of the academic institutes in Prague Na Slovance.

The core of the SenDISo program is the development of a new generation of detectors and chemical biosensor solutions. Interdisciplinary research will focus on the creation of technologies for environmental monitoring (portable VOC sensors for pollution monitoring), improved medical diagnostics (discovery and analysis of trace amounts of biomarkers to combat serious diseases) and radiotherapy and quality control in industry. The new tools will, among other things, enable sensitivity at the level of individual (bio)molecules, opening the door to discoveries in life sciences and early diagnosis of serious diseases such as cancer.

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.

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.

The European Space Agency has approved the so-called adoption of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission with a budget of €1.75 billion. A mission adoption is an important milestone in the development of space projects, where the European Space Agency takes a project from the assessment phase to the actual implementation of concepts and technologies.

The large research infrastructure CzechNanoLab, which LNSM is part of, succeeded greatly in the the call OP JAK – Research Infrastructures I., which was was organised by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. The modernisation project CzechNanoLab+, which has received a staggering 78 points out of 80, making it the most successful project in this call, received the requested funding with a budget of 361 million without any cuts, for equipment modernisation and innovation. The reports of the evaluation committees were published on 29 December 2023.

In a ground-breaking discovery, the Telescope Array Collaboration has detected an extremely energetic particle, named "Amaterasu" after the Japanese celestial sun goddess. This cosmic rays event surpasses the energy achieved by artificial particle accelerators by more than a million times. The origins of such high-energy particle remain mysterious, as tracing back the arrival direction does not reveal an obvious source, for example a galaxy.