Fyzikální ústav Akademie věd ČR

The 6th Dvořák Lecture

From the race to make the first laser to early developments in laser science, a description will be made of the most important achievements. Likewise, the birth of nonlinear optics and the ad- vent of ultrafast laser science will also be considered. In any case, a very coarse review of some of most important achievements will be presented, with the addition of a few anecdotes and cu- riosities as derived by the personal reminiscence of the author.

The 4th Dvořák Lecture

Graphene is an atomically two-dimensional material which was first isolated for electronic property studies by Novoselov, Geim and collaborators from the University of Manchester about ten years ago. It is a gapless semiconductor formed entirely from carbon atoms and can be viewed as a giant aromatic molecule. Graphene’s honeycomb lattice structure is bipartite; atoms on one sublattice have three nearest neighbors all on the other sublattice.

The 2nd Dvořák Lecture

Research on the foundations of quantum mechanics has given rise to the field of quantum information science. It should be stressed that this research beginning around the 1970s was not motivated by search for applications but rather by pure fundamental curiosity.