On June 6, 2017, the Otto Wichterle Award 2017 was given by the President of the Czech Academy of Sciences, prof. Eva Zažímalová. She awarded young scientists who have successfully fulfilled an important scientific task.
Among awarded scintists were also Dr. Miroslav Krůs (Laser Plasma Department) and Dr. Karel Žídek (TOPTEC Centre).
Dr. Miroslav Krůs
has graduated and obtained training in several demanding physical and technical disciplines -
physics of generation, acceleration and detection of energy-charged particles and physics of
laser-plasma. Practical experience gained in large facilities both in the Czech Republic (PALS and
ELI Beamlines) and in abroad (CERN, LBNL, BNL and the Yale University in the USA and APRI GIST in
South Korea). This allows him to devote to an ambitious programme of creating and exploring high
density plasma with different combinations of charged particle beams and energy photons. He is a
co-author of the project "Dense Plasma Research on RI PALS" submitted to the Ministry of Education,
Youth and Sports in frame of the Operational Program Research, Development and Education. He is
also involved in pedagogical activities at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In addition to
the above-mentioned intensive research and pedagogical activities, he also participates in
organizational tasks, for example by joining the Council of the Institute of Plasma Physics and by
providing user experiments within the LASERLAB IV network of large European laser facilities.
Dr. Karel Žídek
studied quantum optics at the Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and
Physics. In his PhD thesis he devoted to nonlinear optical properties of silicon nanostructures. He
has completed several foreign internships, e.g. in Lund, Sweden, and at the Louis Pasteur
University in Strasbourg, France. Currently, he is the principal investigator of the GA ČR junior
project "Coherent excitation coding for the use of compressed sensing in laser spectroscopy". He is
also involved in a number of international projects, he is the co-researcher of the project
"Optical characterization of ultrafast processes in nanostructures and devices" and "Controlling
quantum coherence" (Sweden). He presents at international conferences. He is also involved in
pedagogical and popularization activities and he was also awarded by several international
scientific awards. Currently, he is a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics, the TOPTEC
Centre in Turnov, where he is involved in hyperdimensional imaging in laser spectroscopy using
compressed sensing, deposition and spectroscopic characterization of optical thin films.
6 Jun 2017