News

The telescope FRAM (F/Photometric Robotic Atmospheric Monitor), which is operated by the Institute of Physics of the ASCR at the Pierre Auger Observatory close to the town Malargüe in western Argentina, has successfully observed the asteroid 2012 DA14. The asteroid flew very close to the Earth surface during the evening hours of February 15th, 2013, more specifically at 20:26 CET it flew less than 28,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, what is the record for the celestial body of this size.

A direct transfer of angular momentum from a circularly polarized light to spins allows to excite a magnet from its equilibrium state at sub-picosecond time scales. The discovery, allowing to manipulate spins in a magnet by short laser pulses, was reported by scientists from the joint Laboratory of Opto-Spintronics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University and the Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

Unique combination of plasma temperature and density has been achieved with X-ray free-electron laser

In the first February issue of Nature, a Letter [1] appeared attracting an attention of specialists in areas of high-energy-density physics, laboratory astrophysics, inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and plasma physics. An international team of researchers headed by young Oxford physicist Sam Vinko created a unique state of matter by isochorically heating a thin aluminium foil using a tightly focused X-ray beam produced by the LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source) free-electron laser in California.

Vítězslav Jarý, a PhD student in the Institute of Physics AS CR, has won the first prize in the H. Becquerel competition. He is involved in the Nuclear Chemistry program at FNSPE, CTU and is working on the scintillation mechanisms in the materials based on complex oxides. His studies are focused, in particular, on the problems of energy capture and energy transfer.