Department of Dielectrics

A team of students under the umbrella of the Christian Doppler grammar school is leading after the central round of the Young Physicists Tournament. However, none of the top competitors has won yet. There is still a selection camp left before the end of the competition, which will decide on the nomination of the five best representatives of the Czech Republic for the international round in Lund, Sweden.

Researchers from the Department of Dielectrics at FZU together with their colleagues from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University have succeeded for the first time in observing an electrical analogue of the spin liquid in EuAl₁₂O_19. 

Anna Radochová, a talented high school student, won the first prize in the České hlavičky 2023 competition in the UNIVERSUM category. Anna's successful research project was motivated by her participation in the Open Science programme at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she worked on the topic "Properties of new photosensitive liquid crystals".

In an ambitious project, Tim Verhagen, a Dutch scientist at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, aims to create a new type of material that will have simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric properties at room temperature. The project, which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), involves the deposition of very thin, single-atomic layers of different materials on top of each other to create so called “2D sandwich".

In this year's VYDRA course, the organizers prepared open-solution tasks for students, focusing on general approaches used to solve research tasks. The final meeting took place in the premises of the Institute of Physics on November 1, when the students tried a presentation of the results, including a model scientific discussion.

Two diplomas confirming the highest achievable qualification in a scientist’s career – Doctor of Sciences – has been handed over by the President of the Czech Academy of Sciences Eva Zažímalová to two employees from the Institute of Physics: RNDr. Stanislav Kamba, CSc., DSc., and Mgr. Marek Taševský, Ph.D., DSc.

A team of secondary school students, representing the Czech Republic under the auspices of the Jaroslav Heyerovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry in Prague, has won the silver medal at the 35th year of the International Young Physicists’ Tournament held in Timisoara, Romania, earlier this year. In a tough international competition, they came second, losing only to the German team, following five demanding rounds.

One of the founders of the Department of Dielectrics, outstanding scientist, editor and teacher, enthusiastic promoter of symmetry approaches to ferroic phase transitions and domain boundaries, Prof. Václav Janovec has passed away on February 16,  2022, at the age of his almost complete 92.

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).

The terahertz spectroscopy group of Petr Kužel in collaboration with the Charles University described nonlinear behavior of charge carriers during early times after pulsed optical excitation in epitaxially grown graphene layers. The time evolution of the system is determined by nonlinear electronic response of graphene, which opens the possibility of the increase of the speed of optoelectronic elements. The results the study were published in a prestigious journal Advanced Functional Materials.