Fyzikální ústav Akademie věd ČR

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to François Englert from Belgium and British physicist Peter Higgs for – as the official citation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reads – „the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider“.

We meet friction forces in our everyday life; energy loss or wear of materials due to friction are causes of large financial losses. A quest for better understanding friction, which may help reducing the energy demands of our society, therefore counts among the research priorities in material sciences.