AWARDEE OF TECHNOLOGICAL SCIENCES PRIZE

YIN ZHIWEN

Abstract

Prof.  Yin Zhiwen, materials scientist, was born in Wu Xian, Jiangsu Province on  May 30, 1919.  He graduated from the Department of Mining and Metallurgy.  Yunnan  University in 1942.  Then he went to United States to study the materials science and  engineering, received MS from the Department of Metallurgy, University of Missouri,  Rolla, USA in 1948 and from the Department of Ceramic Engineering, University of  Illinois, Urbana, USA in 1950.  He was elected as the member of the Chinese Academy  of Sciences in 1993 and as an academician of the International Academy of Ceramics in  1996.
After back to China in 1950, Yin Zhiwen devoted himself for about fifty years to the research works in the Chinese Academy of Sciences on functional ceramics and  scintillation crystals.  He was a pioneer in development of the lead zirconate titanate(PZT) piezoelectric ceramics in China in sixties and successfully fabricated a variety of PZT  ceramic materials and elements for different applications in the fields of underwater  acoustic sonar, supersonic and electro-acoustic techniques.  In seventies. he took lead  lanthanum zirconate titanate(PLZT) transparent ceramics as an object of study to  investigate the microstructure changes during phase transition in relaxor ferroelectrics and observed for the first time the nano-size micro-polar regions in their stmctures.  In the  mean time, he studied in detail the grain boundary structure, grain boundary movement  and grain boundary effect in PLZT ceramics.  The theoretical sense and new ideas of  these works obtained high praise by the international ferroelectric commullity.
In the beginning of eighties, at the request of CERN-L3 group, he led a research  oroup to study the growth of bismuth germanate(BGO) scintillating crystals and  production of 12000 pieces of large size crystal to provide CERN-L3 for construction of  electro-magnetic colorimeter.  After recognizing the radiation damage in BGO crystal is a  result of color center formation due to oxygen vacancies in crystal, he successfully  developed a new type of Eu-doped bismuth germanate scintillating crystal with high  radiation hardness.
In recent six to seven years, he is still working on new type scintillating crystals,  which concern barium fluoride(BaF２), lead fluoride(PbF２), cerium fluoride(CeF3),  cesium lodide(CsＩ) and lead tungstate(PbWO4) etc.  Among them, large size good quality  cesium iodide crystals have been successfully produced in large quantity and have been provided  to Stanford University, USA and Institute of High Energy Physics, Japan for construction of their detectors.  For lead tungstate crystal. which has been selected as the  first candidate scintillating material for construction of the CMS detector in large hardron  collider(LHC) by CERN Management.  Now this project is in the period of research and development stage.
Yin Zhiwen in now the research professor and chairman of the academic committee of Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Dean, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai University.