On September 28, 2021, at the age of 82, our former colleague prom. Josef Holakovský, CSc. passed away. After graduating from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague as a theoretical physicist, he joined the Department of Dielectrics in 1968 and ten years later defended his dissertation "Ferroelectric and Antiferroelectric Phase Transition of the Order Type in Mixed Crystals", submitted in 1973).
This year marks a decade since the European Commission and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports approved two unique laser research projects ELI Beamlines and HiLASE, which were both successfully implemented as part of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In celebration of the anniversary, an official meeting attended by the representatives of leading Czech and foreign institutions took place at ELI Beamlines in Dolní Břežany. In a video-call, it was also joined on-line by Gérard Mourou, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics and the initiator of the centre at the European level.
The Nobel Committee has decided to award this year's Nobel Prize for pioneering contributions to the general understanding of complex systems. Half of the prize went to prof. Giorgi Parisi of La Sapienza University in Rome for his discovery of the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.
This year, the Institute of Physics together with the Institute of Physical Engineering at the Brno University of Technology organized another of a series of international summer schools Physics at Nanoscale, again with the support of the International Union of Vacuum Sciences, Technologies and Applications (IUVSTA).
On Wednesday 9 June 2021, we joined the fifth year’s program of the m3 Festival / Art in Space by unveiling a sculpture by Anežka Hošková at the premises of the FZU in Ořechovka.
The establishment of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) ERIC opens the door for researchers, industry and countries to gain access to the world’s largest collection of super powerful and ultra-fast lasers for science.
In the finals of the Young Physicists’ Tournament, a competition of secondary school students, our country will be represented by the Talnet team. They have won their participation in an even national round which due to the COVID-19 epidemics was held on-line. Also this year, the local rounds were organised with help of the Institute of Physics.
The Institute of Physics and the Prague Public Transit Company have recently agreed on mutual cooperation aimed at testing the Prague public transportation network for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.
Innovative methods of material surface treatment and a completely new and unique solution in the field of industrial tool preparation, using laser technologies, are available thanks to Hi-Beams, s.r.o., a newly established spin-off of HiLASE Centre and SHM company, an expert on industrial PVD coatings.
