Awards

The European Physical Society’s 2026 Europhysics Prize for outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics was awarded to Libor Šmejkal, Jairo Sinova and Tomáš Jungwirth for their discovery of altermagnetism, the third fundamental class of magnetic orders. Altermagnets combine the advantages of ferromagnets and antiferromagnets while exhibiting unique properties not found in either of those classes.

The 2026 EPS Europhysics Prize for outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics was awarded to Libor Šmejkal, Jairo Sinova, and Tomáš Jungwirth for their discovery of altermagnetism.

A Czech team of secondary school students from Hlučín, Plzeň and Prague won a gold medal at the international round of the Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT), hosted by Zurich, Switzerland, from 5 to 12 July.

Vladislav Pokorný, a physicist from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU), is a co-author of a study that won the prestigious ACS Nano Impact Award 2026. In it, researchers managed to build a tiny memory by placing single molecules on the surface of a superconductor.

Every year, the Czech Academy of Sciences gives out the Otto Wichterle Award. It goes to exceptional scientists under 35 who achieve top results at the very start of their careers. This year’s laureate from the Institute of Physics of the CAS is Aleš Vlk, who has been focusing on halide perovskites since 2018, materials with the potential to fundamentally improve the efficiency of harvesting energy from the sun.

She spent a year in the FZU laboratories, researching structures invisible to the naked eye, and advanced to the national round of the Students’ Professional Activities (SPA). How did Lucie Krejčová work her way to such a remarkable success?

The article “Synthesis of High Entropy Alloy Nanoparticles by Pulsed Laser Ablation in Liquids: Influence of Target Preparation on Stoichiometry and Productivity” ranks among the ten most cited papers published in 2024 in the journal ChemNanoMat. 

The Institute of Physics has received an award for a video about the testing of silicon sensors for CERN. The award itself takes the form of a statuette resembling a film Oscar.

Jakub Bulička from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences has taken third place in the best diploma thesis category of the Werner von Siemens Award - one of the most prestigious prizes for student research in the Czech Republic.