Invited by Prof. Yubai Pan and Prof. Jiang Li, CAS visiting professor Martin Nikl visited Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SICCAS) from October 25 to November 25. During his visit in SICCAS, both Chinese and Czech sides reached the agreement for long-term collaboration and bilateral-government project in the application of scintillation and laser ceramics.

On November 6, Prof. Martin Nikl gave the lecture entitled “Band gap and defect engineering strategies in the complex oxide scintillators optimization: the differences for Ce and Pr-doping”.

In this lecture, Prof. Martin Nikl demonstrated that solid solutions with suitable ratio of end compositions have shown some advantages in the manufacturing ease and/or scintillation parameters and LYSO:Ce, LuYAP:Ce and also LuYAG:Ce(Pr) became systematically investigated. Even more complex solid solution approach in the garnet family came to discovery of new scintillator family, so called multicomponent garnets, in which the balanced Gd and Ga admixture into YAG:Ce (LuAG:Ce) host enhanced light yield almost three times close to 60 000 ph/MeV which is considered a theoretical limit in such oxide scintillators. These materials are thus the outcome of band gap engineering strategy, in which profound change in composition results in the changes of electronic band structure with positive effect in scintillation characteristics. This lecture discussed the application of the above mentioned strategies in complex oxide scintillators of this kind, the underlying physical mechanism and possibilities for further material improvement.

After that, the scientific researchers and graduate students in SICCAS had hot discussions with Prof. Martin Nikl. This seminar belonged to one of the Series of activities held by the Key Laboratory of Transparent Opto-functional Inorganic Materials, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences is a public research institute, oriented on the fundamental and applied research in physics. Prof. Martin Nikl currently serves as the department head and vice-director for targeted research in Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic. His research interests include luminescence and scintillation mechanism in wide band-gap solids, energy transfer processes and role of material defects in them. He is the coordinator and participant in about 30 domestic and 10 international projects so far in the field of scintillation materials. He is author and co-author of more than 600 papers in the refereed impacted international journals and six chapters in books. He has been authored and co-authored 38 invited keynote and plenary lectures at different international conferences. His publications received more than 6800 citations (Scopus, auto-citations excluded), Hirsch factor, H=49. 

Prof. Martin Nikl gave a lecture