News and press releases

The prize of the President of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic 2019 was awarded to a project in which scientists from the Laboratory of Tandetron (LT), part of the CANAM infrastructure, participated in 2016-2018. The main investigator of the project Using ion beams for the modification of graphene-based structures was doc. Ing. Zdeněk Sofer, Ph.D. (University of Chemistry and Technology Prague - Faculty of Chemical Technology). The co-investigator of the project was doc. RNDr. Anna Macková, Ph.D. (NPI), head of LT. 

In the sixth edition of the CAS competition Photogenic Science, three photos by two NPI employees were awarded. Michal Dobeš won first place in the Academic Council Awards category for the photo named Inflated frog and shared second place (alongside A. Braunová from the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry of the CAS) in the Scientists and Their Hobby category for the photo named Fear. Shared third place in this category (alongside P. Palečková from the Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the CAS) was won by Roman Garba for his photo Like from another planet.

A traditional part of the CAS event Week of Science and Technology, which will run from November 11 to 17, 2019, will also be the Open Day in the Řež scientific area. This event will be organized jointly by NPI, Institute of Inorganic Chemistry of the CAS, ÚJV Řež and Research Center Řež, from November 15 to 16.

The Nuclear Physics Division (NPD) of the European Physical Society (EPS) introduces a new EPS-NPD divisional conference. The Applied Nuclear Physics Conference (ANP) has a particular emphasis on energy, health, space, security, environment, material science, preservation and study of cultural heritage.

On Thursday, September 19, 2019, the president of the Czech Academy of Sciences Eva Zažímalová has given titles of Doctor of Science (DSc.) to ten outstanding scientists at the Library of the CAS in Prague. Nina V. Shevchenko, Ph.D., an employee of the NPI, was among them.

Neutrinos are important elementary particles, e.g. the thermonuclear reaction in the Sun ‒ one of the conditions for living on our Earth ‒ could not proceed without neutrinos. Scientists already succeeded in clarifying various neutrino properties but, regardless many decades effort, they determined only crude limits for the neutrino mass. The international project KATRIN  (Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment) aims to increase the sensitivity of “the neutrino weight” by a factor of ten. The scientists in the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences at Řež, who belong among founders of this unique experiment, have developed for KATRIN precise sources of monoenergetic electrons.

Nature Physics magazine, the most important periodical publication in physics with 5-year impact factor 21.8, has published an article Probing dense baryon-rich matter with virtual photons, in its July issue. The article is a collective work of scientists from the HADES Collaboration, part of the FAIR project. Among the co-authors, there are also several NPI workers, working on the FAIR-CZ project: A. Kugler, P. Tlustý, O. Svoboda, V. Wagner, L. Chlad, P. Rodriguez-Ramos and Yu. G. Sobolev.

Construction work of NPI building No. 231 for the new AMS laboratory has started in the spring of this year within the framework of the RAMSES project (“Ultra-trace isotope research in social and environmental studies using accelerator mass spectrometry”, i.e. AMS), funded by European Structural and Investment Funds, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš visited the premises of research institutes at Řež on Friday, April 5, 2019. At the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS (NPI), he looked at a new laboratory of the cyclotron TR-24. He has been acquainted with TR-24 use in energy research and investigation of new prospective radiopharmaceuticals.

The European large research infrastructure FAIR GmbH and the Nuclear Physics Institute (NPI) of the Czech Academy of Sciences signed the Agreement about Aspirant Partnership of the Czech Republic in the FAIR.  The signing ceremony was held at the GSI and FAIR campus in Darmstadt. The NPI has been delegated by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport to represent the Czech Republic in FAIR and to coordinate the work of the Czech scientific community contributing to FAIR.