Twenty-four talented scientists from the Czech Academy of Sciences received the prestigious Otto Wichterle Award this year. It has been awarded since 2002, and this year was the Jubilee's 20th year. The ceremony was held at the Lanna Villa in Prague on June 29, 2021. Among the awards were two young scientists from IPP. Dr. Petr Vondráček from the Tokamak Department and Dr. František Lukáč from the Department of Materials Engineering.
Since his doctorate at the Mathematical Physics Faculty of Charles University, the
professional interest of Petr Vondráček is focused on studying energy flows on the internal wall of
tokamaks. Over the last few years, he has been involved in the achievement of several important
results which have been used in the construction of the large international scientific facility
ITER. He was a tokamak operator at COMPASS for six years. He is coordinating a large group of
physicists, engineers and modelers who are jointly designing the new COMPASS Upgrade tokamak. He
also works with experts from Germany, France, the US, the UK or Canada, with whom he has been
involved in foreign experiments on ASDEX Upgrade and JET tokamaks within the European consortium
EUROfusion.
Material research is the framework of František Lukáč's research. The young physicist
graduated from the Mathematical Physics Faculty of Charles University, joined IPP in 2015 as a
postdoctoral fellow and soon became a very important member of the team. It develops research into
spot defects of materials (especially alloys) in interaction with hydrogen and nitrogen using
various experimental methods including X-ray diffraction or positron anihilation spectroscopy. Or,
it examines what happens in alloys and how they behave under set conditions. But what he's most
interested in is the high-entropic alloys, whose studies he actually institutionalized. He is
heavily involved in international material research. He was also involved in a project that won the
2018 Werner von Siemens Prize in the category of Most Important Result of Basic Research. František
Lukáč is also an expert in the field of phase analysis of materials using the X-ray diffraction
method with quantitative Rietveld analysis. It handles these analyses for university research teams
as well as for companies.
Photo: CAS
29 Jun 2021
