Vladislav Pokorný, a physicist from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU), is a co-author of a study that won the prestigious ACS Nano Impact Award 2026. In it, researchers managed to build a tiny memory by placing single molecules on the surface of a superconductor.
On the night of June 30, a large survey telescope designed to map the ever-changing universe began full-scale operations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This marks a major shift in how we gather knowledge about our planet’s immediate and distant surroundings. Over the course of three nights, the telescope captures images of the entire southern sky—and it will repeat this process for ten years. As a result, we will obtain an astronomical amount of data and records of what changes in the sky and how. This will allow us to explore the universe in ways that were previously inaccessible to us.
Most wireless electronics would not work without varactors. An international team that includes Czech physicists has now developed a material for them that lets electronics use less energy. The study appeared in the prestigious journal Nature Electronics.
Every year, the Czech Academy of Sciences gives out the Otto Wichterle Award. It goes to exceptional scientists under 35 who achieve top results at the very start of their careers. This year’s laureate from the Institute of Physics of the CAS is Aleš Vlk, who has been focusing on halide perovskites since 2018, materials with the potential to fundamentally improve the efficiency of harvesting energy from the sun.
Billions of them are passing through our bodies right now, and yet they are almost impossible to catch. For this year's Dvořák Lecture, we hosted one of the world's leading experts on neutrinos, Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold, who heads the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.
That was just one of the many burning questions tackled at the conference ‘Re:vision of Science: From RDM to Evaluation Reform’ at the FZU. Guest speakers from across the Czech Academy of Sciences’ institutes and Czech universities as well as international keynote speakers shared best practice in open science, but also raised important points that need to be solved – such as the future of responsible data sharing and building truly global, resilient infrastructures.
Our exhibit dominated the first hall and became one of the fair’s most popular stops. Visitors could not only view the physical phenomena we presented but also experience them firsthand.
This year's Family Day was all about a cosmic adventure. On the afternoon of 10 June, nearly 150 visitors, our employees and their families, came to FZU AV ČR, where children and adults alike could set off on a journey among the stars, planets and other mysteries of the universe.
At the end of May, an atom probe tomography (APT) laboratory started operating at the Institute of Thermomechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. It is an instrument that can examine a small piece of material atom by atom. The laboratory was funded by the OP JAK FerrMion project, in which the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences also plays a significant role.
