Dr. Norbert Neumann from InfraTec Gmbh Germany visited the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SICCAS) during Aug. 27 -30, 2009. InfraTec is a world famous infra-red technology company, focusing on pyroelectric infrared detectors and thermographic applications. This was Dr. Neumann’s third times to visit SICCAS since both sides established the collaboration relationship to develop high performance PMNT pyroelectric devices from 2005.

　　In the year of 2003, Prof. Luo’s group found that relaxor-based ferroelectric single crystals, such as PMNT single crystals exhibit excellent pyroelectric properties along the spontaneous polarization direction, which is the first time in the world. This discovery is a great advance in the pyroelectric materials, which has great impacts on the next generation of high performance infrared detectors. It extends the applications of relaxor ferroelectric single crystals from high performance piezoelectric devices to the novel applications of high performance infrared detectors and thermal imaging systems. The collaboration between SICCAS and InfraTec has made great progress on PMNT infrared detectors. Dr. Neumann gave a lecture of Application of PMNT in Pyroelectric Detectors at the Jiading campus on Aug. 28. Novel pyroelectric detectors has been fabricated successfully with the specific detectivity D* higher than 1×109 cmHz1/2W-1, which is about twice as much as commercial LiTaO3 infrared detectors.

　　Dr. Neumann visited the Laboratory of Prof. Luo’s group after his lecture. By the support from Deputy director Jianhua Yang, Prof. Luo and Dr. Neumann discussed the collaboration in the next steps for the goal to speed up the commercialization of the novel PMNT pyroelectric detectors. Prof. Jiaxiong Fang, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Yanjin Li and Dr. Xiumei Shao from Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, who make advanced research on the pyroelectric arrayed infra-red devices using PMNT single crystals, also attended the lecture. It is impressive that great progress has been made on the novel high performance infrared detectors based on relalxor-based ferroelectric single crystals by the effective collaboration between SICCAS and InfraTec.