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New biophysical laboratory equipped for a wide range of biological experiments, was opened at the Institute of Physics CAS on Wednesday, December 7th, 2016. Newly built cell culturing facility in conjunction with a new microscopic laboratory create a basic infrastructure for interdisciplinary biophysical workplace allowing to do a comprehensive research in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine fields.

The European Commission has officially announced that is to co-fund the creation of a new "Centre of Excellence" (CoE) for the industrial exploitation of new laser technology in partnership with the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. Scientists from Czech Institute of Physics and the STFC's Central Laser Facility in Oxfordshire, UK, will work together on the 5.5 year / 45 MEuro project. This is the first time to be funded under the "Widespread Teaming" programme within Horizon 2020 that aims to improve the innovation performance of Member states.

Scientists from the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of Czech Academy of Sciences observed a chemical transformation of individual molecules on silver surface and demonstrated chirality transfer during the reaction. They employed the latest advances of scanning probe microscopy, which allows scientists to determine the chemical bond between individual atoms within molecules and thus determine their molecular structure and the chirality. The results were published in the prestigious journal Nature Chemistry.

A group of researchers from the Institute of Physics, together with an international team, studied the dynamics of water molecules in beryl crystals. As reported in their recent article in Nature Communications, they succeeded in proving for the first time that, at low temperatures, these localized water molecules tend to align, exhibiting so-called incipient ferroelectricity.

A team of researchers from the Institute of Physics and Institute of Thermomechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently published a study in the Science journal, which for the first time explained the mesomechanics of localized deformation in tensioned wire. Unlike other materials which deform homogenously, when NiTi wire is being stretched inelastic deformation proceeds via propagation of macroscopic transformation fronts separating transformed and untransformed regions.

Scientists from the Institute of Physics together with colleagues from Utrecht University developed a new method to image the electrostatic field of molecules at the atomic level. The work, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications [1], advances our current possibilities to image individual molecules on a solid surface using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM).

International research team demonstrates electrical switching of an antiferromagnet Ferromagnets and antiferromagnets are the two common forms of magnetically ordered materials. Traditionally we thought that magnetism can be easily controlled and utilized only in ferromagnets. Researchers from the Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and Germany change this perception by demonstrating electrical switching of magnetization in an antiferromagnetic microchip.

During November 14 - 17, 2015, the Pierre Auger Collaboration celebrated the inauguration of AugerPrime. Spread over an area of 3000 km2 in the 'yellow pampa' in western Argentina, Auger is the largest cosmic ray experiment in the world. AugerPrime allows the Czech researchers to contribute to discerning the mysteries of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays until 2025.

The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world’s leading science project for the exploration of cosmic rays. The Observatory has achieved excellent results helping scientists to better understand particles with energies more than million times larger than the beam energy at the current world largest accelerator.

The electronic properties of solid state materials used in today’s electronic devices are governed by properties of valence electrons. One such property is the spin of the electron, which, in layman’s terms, is the sense of rotation of the spinning motion of the electron. As realized almost ninety years ago by German physicist Friedrich Hund (1896 – 1997), the electrons in a given atom all tend to spin with the same sense of rotation, a rule of thumb which is now called Hund’s rule

Researchers from the Institute of Physics and the University of Regensburg (Germany) introduced a new method of atomic force microscopy (Atomic Force Microscopy = AFM), which allows to resolve the polarity of individual chemical bonds in a single molecule. The possibility of the detailed resolution of the charge distribution in the chemical bonds within a molecule significantly advances our current possibilities to study the charge transfer at the atomic and molecular level.

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