The 2025 Academic Award, an award given each year to three outstanding individuals whose past research results promise good prospects for the future, was presented to Lukáš Palatinus, a scientist at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The award provides his research team with financial support in the amount of CZK 30 million. Over the course of six years, this money can be used for laboratory equipment, staff salaries, and other research costs.
You are bringing several large envelopes from the post office – is this how you collect samples for crystallographic analysis? Who sends them to you and where do they come from?
This is how we receive samples of materials from different parts of the world. They are mainly sent to us by academic institutions, although we also process commercial samples from time to time. For example, we have been collaborating for four years with a research group from Ljubljana that prepares compounds of rare gases, mainly xenon. We have already analysed dozens of their samples.
It had long been assumed that rare gases were completely inert and did not form any compounds. Later, however, it was discovered that this is not entirely true and that xenon, for example, can react with fluorine or oxygen. The aforementioned group of Slovenian scientists produces substances that no one else can produce. And we are able to determine the crystal structure of these substances. Very few people can do that.
Where is the second envelope from?
It came from a Spanish laboratory that works on the preparation of zeolites. This is an important group of substances that contain pores, which function as chemical nanomanufacturing plants. They can absorb molecules and catalyse chemical reactions. This is a very intensively researched group of materials.
We need to understand what is happening inside them and therefore know their internal structure. That is when our methods come into play.
How many such samples do you examine?
These are the first dozens of samples per year. We usually work with one material for a month. One person from the team is usually assigned a specific sample. First, we need to collect data, which means spending time at the electron microscope. After the initial analysis, it usually turns out that we need to measure again. Then, the collected data need to be carefully analysed. All of this takes some time. The others contribute to the work by discussing the results and sometimes advising on what to do when a problem arises.
What does the result of your work look like when you send it back to Spain or Slovenia?
It varies greatly and depends on the collaboration purpose. Sometimes the material is created to do something specific, such as absorb carbon dioxide. We serve as support for characterizing the resulting material. Other times, a scientific group will "cook up" a new substance that has potentially interesting properties—electrical, optical, or mechanical. In order to prove the existence of useful properties and explain why they are so, they need to know the crystal structure of the substance. That's our turn.
Most often, the output of our work is a description of the crystal structure, i.e., a text file of the cif type – Crystallographic Information File, which contains all the details about the positions and types of atoms in the crystal's unit cell. This information can then be further interpreted, for example, in terms of physical properties. This tells you things about the material that you cannot see when you measure and describe it only macroscopically. The crystal structure is basic information that everyone who works with materials needs.
In 2017, you received the Neuron Foundation Award for young scientists. Sven Lidin, who has been President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since this summer, said about you at the time: "There is no one else in the world who does what Lukáš does (...)." Is this still true today?
It can no longer be said that no one else does it. But others learned it from us and based on our work. Crystal structures are not determined by magnifying and examining them. They are determined indirectly using a physical phenomenon called diffraction, or the scattering of radiation on crystals. This radiation cannot be just any radiation; it must have the right properties.
For over a hundred years we can make use of the X-ray diffraction. But in addition to X-rays, other types of radiation that we do not usually consider to be radiation can also be used—neutrons and electrons. In quantum mechanics, they behave like radiation, i.e., like waves. That is the focus of our work here. Our department has an X-ray diffraction group, which the work of Vašek Petříček made known worldwide.
My group and I are working on the use of electron diffraction. This method has its roots in the 1930s. About twenty years ago, it began to be widely used to determine crystal structures. There are several groups working on this. However, we look at electron scattering on crystals in a little more detail and with greater precision than others. Most people have adopted the theory and software used for X-ray diffraction for electron diffraction. This gives fairly reliable results, but it is not accurate. We are not satisfied with X-ray theory and are developing our own methods and software specific to electrons, which we make available to others.
How many people are working with you on the development of electron diffraction?
There are 12 people in my group, including one technician and two specialists in programming and software development, two PhD students, four postdocs, and three senior scientists. Sample analysis, described a moment ago, is actually more of a secondary activity for us. The main goal is to improve the methods of such analysis and give others the tools they need to obtain new or better results themselves. By analysing samples from around the world, we are actually killing two birds with one stone. We help people who develop materials and need to determine their structure but don't have the conditions or knowledge to do so, while at the same time testing and improving our methods in practice.
What does the Academic Award mean for you and your team?
In practical terms, it means a little more freedom and a chance to keep the team together. In the academic world, there is always the threat of having to say goodbye to someone. Team funding depends on grants, and when one ends, you can't always get another one. The Academic Award, along with other grants we are seeking, will help us continue the work we have started and give me more freedom in choosing topics.
Will you use the award to embark on any new projects?
The Academic Award will allow us development in three basic directions. I have been working on determining structures using electron diffraction for 15 years, but there is still work to be done and room for improvement. I would like to continue with that. At the same time, I see other challenges that I would like to tackle. Before I started working on electron diffraction, I was involved in solving the phase problem in X-ray crystallography. That was the first strong impulse in my scientific career, when I contributed to progress in this field. With the development of neural networks and machine learning, I find it interesting to return to the problem and use new methods to advance the issue. I am in contact with people who are interested in pursuing this, and the Academic Award is a major incentive to transform a marginal interest into something I will pursue intensively.
And finally, the third, somewhat wild, but at the same time most interesting thing. The holy grail of imaging methods is the ability to see atoms and determine their positions in non-crystalline materials. What we do with crystals is amazing. We can determine the positions of atoms with very good accuracy. But this is based on the fact that the arrangement of atoms in a crystal is regular. When we take a material where this arrangement does not exist, such as glass, our ability to penetrate the structure of the material is very limited. This is what I would like to focus on. I see that there has been progress in technology and algorithms, with the emergence of electron ptychography and ptychotomography. I think that the "holy grail" is within reach. I would like to get more hands-on experience with electron ptychography, bring it to the Institute of Physics and the Czech Republic in general, and contribute to the development of this method or its use for the analysis of non-crystalline materials.
Author: Věra Ondřichová
The interview was also published on the Vědavýzkum.cz portal.
Photo: Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences
