Awards

A total of seven Lumina Quaeruntur premiums for researchers of younger and middle generation have been awarded by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic within a programme to support prospective scientists. One of the recognized researchers is Ippocratis Saltas from Centre for Cosmology and Fundamental Physics of the Institute of Physics. The annual ceremony at which laureates are handed over prizes by Eva Zažímalová, the president of the Academy of Sciences, was postponed due to epidemiological measures.

Humans in every civilisation have always been intrigued by the question of the origin of life. During thousands of years, numerous answers have been provided by mystics and clerics. Then, philosophers offered their own speculative solutions of this conundrum. Science entered the field not long ago. Systematic investigations of physical and chemical phenomena, which likely played a role in the origin of life, began in the middle of last century. Currently, it represents a strong research stream wherein also our Institute participates.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to three physicists for their discoveries in the field of black holes. A half of the prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was received by a British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose for proving that the formation of black holes is a prediction of the General Theory of Relativity, the second half of the prize was received jointly by a German researcher Reinhard Genzel and an American researcher Andrea Ghez for their discovery of supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Petr Šittner from the Institute of Physics has become one of the laureates of this year’s Academy Premium awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences. The president of the Academy of Sciences only announced the four winners for the first time in the fourteen-year history of the prominent science award, in a departure from the traditional prize-giving ceremony.

A photo taken by an electron microscope sent to a competition for the cover page of a prestigious journal Materials Today published by Elsevier brought success to our PhD student Karel Tesař.

John Mangeri won the second place in the FZU Photo Competition for his image of a computational simulation of a BaTiO₃ nanoparticle (see Figure 1). Alexey Bubnov got the 3^rd-4^th place for his image of a beautiful liquid crystal texture seen under polarized light microscope (see Figure 2).

Photos of liquid crystals under a polarized microscope brought the second place to Vladimíra Novotná in the category of ‘Photogenic Science’.