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The NTC Research of Advanced Materials team has completed the project "Computational and Experimental Design of Advanced Materials with New Functionalities." The project was financed under the operational program Research, Development, and Education, which seeks to support excellent research teams. Its main objective was to conduct experimental and theoretical studies of the structural, electrical, magnetic, and spectroscopic properties of new technologically promising materials.

The project began in January 2017 and concluded at the end of last year. The project audit took place earlier this year, and the final CSPES 2022/23 conference in Plasy was held in March. The conference focused on the project's outputs and the latest experimental and theoretical developments in the field of electronic properties of materials investigated by photoemission and electron spectroscopy.

Thirty experts attended the event, and among the speakers were Didier SEBILLEAU from the Institute of Physics of Rennes, Karol Hricovini from the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Juraj Krempasky from the Paul Scherrer Institut, and many others. 

The full stop behind the successful project is the recent publication of an article in the scientific journal Physical Review Letter, published by APS - the professional organization for physicists in the USA. A collective of authors including Ján Minár and Jakub Schusser (both members of the aforementioned project consortium) deal with tungsten ditelluride in the article. This material is not typical material. For example, its electrical resistance keeps rising as the strength of an applied magnetic field increases, while the most other materials that exhibit this effect, the resistance levels off. Scientists have now discovered its other remarkable property: the photon-induced photoemission of electrons has a previously unseen spin behavior. The team suggests that the discovery could lead to a better understanding of the electrical properties of this important quantum material and that similar effects will be seen in materials that have crystal structures similar to it.

Even before the completion of the scientific activities on the existing project, the research team worked on the preparation of a new project called "QM4ST - Quantum materials for applications in sustainable technologies", which was submitted as part of the announced call for cutting-edge research in the OP JAK program. In the new project, the consortium led by Professor Minár wants to focus on the development of quantum materials for applications in sustainable technologies. "Together with NTC, the main solver of the project is also the Department of Physics from the Faculty of Applied Sciences at ZČU in Pilsen. Our partners in the project will be the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics from Charles University in Prague, the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics from Masaryk University in Brno, as well as the CEITEC workplace from the University of Technology in Brno. Now we all hope that our intensive work will bear fruit and the project will be supported," says Professor Minár.

The Advanced Materials Research team has long been among the workplaces showing some of the best results not only at NTC but within the entire University of West Bohemia. The researchers, under the leadership of Ján Minár, investigate and search for new materials with unique properties, connecting the knowledge gained from theoretical and experimental methods that are used in the field of quantum sensors and detectors, spintronics, energy conversion, etc. "Just the combination of theory and experiment under one roof makes our team truly unique because usually, scientific workplaces focus either only on an experiment or on calculations," adds Professor Minár in conclusion.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 146401 (2023) - Geometry-Induced Spin Filtering in Photoemission Maps from ${\mathrm{WTe}}_{2}$ Surface States