"In general we deal with electromagnetism, in a narrower perspective we study antennas and radiation, i.e. technologies used for example in mobile phones," said doc. Čapek, who works at the Department of Electromagnetic Field. "The more services a device provides, for example, a mobile phone certainly covers at least six different frequencies and services, the more difficult it is to design antennas in a confined space. Thus, we use different tools to help us, and one of them is modal theory, which is the subject of the award-winning paper," the scientist added.
Čapek explained that when designing antennas it is necessary to find a suitable shape and power supply, considering other boundary conditions. "It is difficult to combine the correct shape and boundary conditions for a particular antenna. We can remove some boundary conditions within the modal theory and just look at how the shape under consideration might work. This can be illustrated with the example of a guitar - when you play guitar, it makes some notes by playing it with your fingers. But you can also look at a guitar from a modal theory perspective by looking at how individual strings of a given length and stiffness might play in principle," the researcher pointed out, adding that a similar approach can be used in antenna research and development.
"We can look at a particular shape and see what modes can exist on that structure. The article was about calculating these modes, which is a pretty technical thing. But we were able to describe a topic that requires a lot of equations practically without them. Instead, we used a lot of boxes with examples and analogies. People who read this magazine liked that," said Čapek.
The IEEE, from which Miloslav Čapek and his colleague Schab received the award, is an American organization that brings together electrical engineers from all over the world. "There are people from power, communications, or computer science. This organization is divided into individual societies. I'm active in one of them myself, the Antennas and Propagation Society. The society publishes, among other things, three traditional journals - IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, and just IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine," explained Čapek.
"Transactions contains original scientific articles communicated within the scientific community, Letters publishes shorter articles with original ideas, and Magazine is a journal that tries to popularize a topic. While it is not as scientifically high as Transactions, on the other hand, it is widely read," pointed out Assoc. Čapek added that each journal has one award, which goes to an article published in the journal in a certain year. "And what does the award mean for us? We appreciate it very much, I think it is a good achievement," the researcher concluded.
Source of the photo: IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society
