Physicist and chemist Zdenek Herman named "Czech Head" of 2003

Physicist and chemist Zdenek Herman named "Czech Head" of 2003

In 2002 a team of scientists and marketing experts launched a project called Czech Head, which is intended to support and promote Czech science among the public, to make it an attractive "brand". Czech Head includes a number of activities and its culmination is an annual award bearing the same name. Ahead of this year's award ceremony, I talked to Vaclav Marek of the organisation's planning committee.

"The project Czech Head was started because Czechs until now did not have a sufficiently publicly known award for scientists, researchers or inventors. There was a niche on the Czech market. All Czechs knew about the Nobel Prize but nobody could name a Czech prize. We tried to fill the gap, so that the Czechs could say, yes, there is the Nobel Prize but we have our own award, the Czech Head."

This year, eighty scientists and projects were nominated for the Czech Head award, which has a number of categories, including those for university and high school students. The prizes were awarded by a jury of academics and industry experts.

There were seven winners in the partial categories and the main prize, the Czech Head for Lifelong Work went to physicist and chemist Zdenek Herman, the head of the research team at the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Professor Herman, who has won a number of international scientific awards, also teaches physical chemistry at the Institute of Chemical Technology. In his research he focuses on the dynamics of chemical reactions or the collisions of ions - something Professor Herman calls "billiards with particles".

"Our research concerns investigation of elementary chemical reactions of ions on the level of collisions of single molecules. This area of research of chemical physics is called dynamics of chemical reactions or reactive scattering and what we do is we are trying to investigate a chemical reaction under the conditions of two single particles; atoms, ions or molecules and to do it we have to do it in a high vacuum where the particles are isolated practically and do not collide there where we would not like them to collide. We try to prepare them in the form of beams in high vacuum and the molecules and particles are, as I always say to students, so far from each other that if they were the size of a human being, the next one would be something like five kilometres away. So the collision is really isolated and from the scattering of the new particles which resulted from this chemical reaction we can say something about the transformation of energy, the mechanisms of reaction and the basic rules that govern the occurrence of chemical reactions."

Is the Czech contribution in this field significant of an international scale?

"We have been invited to international conferences for decades, so I hope there is some contribution to it and we are part of international cooperation programmes. As a matter of fact, I spent five years in the United States working on this problem. Actually, the first experiments were done when I was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University in the United States. Then I brought the method here and introduced it here in the late 1960s."