Press Releases

The biochip is as fast as an antigen test and at the time as reliable as the PCR method. A team of Czech scientists led by Hana Lísalová has achieved the most crucial milestone in the development of a unique system for the detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19. Biosensor research, which the system is based on, confirmed their sensitivity and reliability and opened new options for further development in this area.

We are happy to announce that the BIVOJ laser system is once again a record holder in its performance class. This is BIVOJ's second world record this year and the third overall. Earlier this month the high energy output from BIVOJ was converted (via second harmonic frequency conversion) to 515 nm wavelength pulses with an energy of more than 68 J at a repetition rate of 10 Hz, which at the time of writing is the world's highest average power in the category of high energy (>1 J), high average power lasers.

Until now, observing subatomic structures was beyond the resolution capabilities of direct imaging methods, and this seemed unlikely to change. Czech scientists, however, have presented a method with which they became the first in the world to observe an inhomogeneous electron charge distribution around a halogen atom, thus confirming the existence of a phenomenon that had been theoretically predicted but never directly observed. 

Researchers of the Czech Academy of Sciences succeeded in the second year of the JUNIOR STAR competition of the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) and made up a half of the total number of supported 16 projects. This year from our institute, it was Prokop Hapala and Dominik Kriegner who succeeded in the big competition for grants. The Institute of Physics and the Czech Technical University thus have two awarded scientists, and came after the Masaryk University, which won three projects.

At the beginning of March 2021, the TOTEM experiment from CERN’s LHC accelerator together with the D0 experiment from the former Tevatron accelerator at the Fermilab laboratory announced the discovery of the odderon – a special form of matter which is formed by states composed of (at least) three gluons and which was predicted already more than 50 years ago.

Recently, large-scale testing of Prague‘s public transportation system for signs of Covid-19 transmissibility was initiated by the Prague Public Transit Company (DPP). The extensive testing of the system, which was carried out in April 2021 by researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (AVČR), found no evidence of the infectious presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.