Department of Structure Analysis

The world's leading mineralogist Jakub Plášil has been unravelling complex crystal structures and discovering new minerals for years. At first glance, it might seem that this is a marginal area of science that is not "in vogue" today. Yet Plášil and his colleagues are making discoveries that have broader implications – for example, in understanding how uranium and other metallic elements are distributed in nature. His research has won him an award by the European Mineralogical Union.

Everyday things have interesting aspects if we choose to explore them a little. Crystallography studies substances in the solid state. When a chicken egg is considered, only the shell is solid. That's what we decided to analyse using X-ray diffraction.

Jiří Hybler studied geology at the Faculty of Science and was directed to crystallography, which was then beginning to develop rapidly in our country, by Professor Jiří Novák. 

Ondra unexpectedly passed away in the midst of diligent work on November 10, 2023. For those who would like to hear Ondra once again, we send a link to his lecture on magnetism from last year's online workshop on Jana. We won't hear this year's lecture.

Swapping your left shoe for the right one while putting them on is unpleasant, but swapping molecules in the same way when making medicines can be fatal - instead of a drug poison is produced. A new method invented by a team of international scientists led by Lukas Palatinus from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences will help prevent this. The unique procedure for determining the position of atoms in crystals was published last week in the Nature Chemistry journal.

On September 28, the Neuron Endowment Fund awarded two leading scientists of the Institute of Physics. In the Pantheon of the National Museum, Václav Petříček received the highest prize awarded, Neuron Prize for Contribution to World Science, and Prokop Hapala was ranked by the Neuron Board among seven promising young scientists awarded.

Crystals are as a construction set. They are made up from tiny building blocks which often are molecules. Lukáš Palatinus is able to determine what molecules look like and how they are put together in a crystal. He can thus create new models of crystal structures. An imperfect crystal, which is characterised by errors and inaccuracies in the cube structure, is another scientific challenge for Lukáš Palatinus.

A work published Science in March 2020 shows that the development of crystallographic calculations also plays an important role in top physical research.