Division of Solid State Physics

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.

The conference and workshop were focused on the latest discoveries in the area of crystal growth, epitaxy, characterization and applications.

Matěj Hývl from the Department of Thin Films and Nanostructures presented a contribution entitled “Nanoscale Study of the Hole-selective Passivating Contacts for High-Efficiency Silicon Solar Cells Using C-AFM Tomography“ for which he received one of the three awards for the best poster at the conference.

Pavla Štenclová, Ph.D., received the Austin Barnes´ Prize for the best poster. The presented results were obtained during the research stay at the University of Ulm.