On Friday 6th October 2017 the Institute of Physics joined the Europe-wide festival Researcher’s Night, which presents research institutes to the general public in the unusual atmosphere of evening and night hours. The Researchers’ Night was visited by 550 visitors who got to know the top-class persons in the current physical research in the Czech Republic through a number of lectures and tours and they had an opportunity to see modern laboratories and research workplaces in their own eyes.
The Na Slovance building welcomed the visitors by a lecture on cosmology and particle research Tajemství vesmíru a mikrosvěta (Mysteries of the Universe and Microworld) and then by tours into the world of functional materials where the visitors had an opportunity to find out why metals can remember their shape or what discoveries can we uncover using a scanning electron microscope. The tour of the ATLAS detector on the LHC accelerator in CERN had its première using the SD virtual reality while some information from the control room of the detector are transmitted to the virtual reality in real time.
At the Cukrovarnická facility a programme Sausages, lasers, atoms – physics through all senses took place intended mainly for students of physics and those who are seriously interested studying it. In the course of the whole-evening programme twenty visitors were able to test what it means to do real science – measuring with scanning electron microscope, microscope of atom forces or Raman spectrometer, all under the supervision of a researcher from the FZU. The whole experience was complemented by more serious physics in the form of impressive experiments and by eating sausages together.