News: Institute of Physics

Dear colleagues, we would like to invite you to the seminar of Division of Elementary Particle Physics of Institute of Physics, presented by Dr. Jakub Juryšek. For more info, please see invitation.

Active substances of drugs, alone or in combination with each other, herbs and herbal supplements are metabolized by the human liver. This metabolization can be associated with irreversible damage or even death of the patient. There is no effective prevention against this problem. Additionally, there is no simple drug testing preclinical system to decipher hepatotoxicity issues undoubtfully at early stages of the drug development. Deeper understanding of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) mechanisms is the goal of an international team of experts from the Prospective European Drug-induced Liver Injury Network (PRO-EURO DILI Network), who met on March 9 and 10 at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

There are pieces of news that are hard to believe. This applies also to the one about the decease of Vláďa Cháb, who was known for his immeasurable vitality and sporting spirit. Unfortunately, his great scientific and sporting heart stopped on the night of March 5, 2023, at the age of 76. When I heard about a month ago that he was not in good health, I did not pay much attention to the news. I believed that there was no illness or obstacle that Vláďa’s spirit could not handle. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

At the HiLASE Centre, we offer our superb research infrastructure to other users, completely free of charge. In order to apply for the beamtime in our facility, you only need to send us your proposal via the electronic HiLASE Open Access Proposal Management System. The right time to apply is just now: the call for proposals is open from 1st March to 15th May 2023.

The HiLASE Centre would like to invite you to participate in the annual LIDT Challenge. In this competition, we are going to test the samples of your anti-reflective coated windows. As a reward, you will gain qualified knowledge of the respective damage thresholds of your components.

In HiLASE Centre, a new generation of diode-pumped lasers with high average power and high repetition frequency has been developed for a long time. We talked to Jan Brajer, a leading expert from the HiLASE Centre, about colours of the laser as well as success in laser shock peening.

New method to obtain different martensitic phases in Ni-Mn-Ga-Fe alloy with simplified variant microstructures allows us to analyze the crystal structure of NM, 14M, and 10M martensites in greater detail. We found that the short crystallographic axes of different martensites at the same temperature have different lengths which suggests that the equilibrium NM structure building blocks cannot be used to build the crystal structures of 14M and 10M martensites. As a replacement for the NM building block model we introduce a constant plane shift model with identical shifting values of the nearest planes (110) along [ ] or [ ]. The work demonstrates that the value of plane shifting differs dramatically between martensites in agreement with ab initio calculations. The application of the constant plane shift and hard sphere models in modulated lattices for atomic-level twinning considerations will be discussed.