Pieter Dorenbos

Pieter Dorenbos is head of the section Luminescence Materials and has over 30 years of experience in the field. From the start of his career at TU-Delft in 1988, he has been developing inorganic scintillating materials for detection of ionizing radiation. It has led to various patented and now commercially available new scintillators. Most noteworthy are the discovery of the LaCl₃:Ce³⁺ and LaBr₃:Ce³⁺ that combine high speed scintillation with record low energy resolution for gamma ray detection. His interest widened from scintillators to the much broader field of lanthanide activated luminescence phosphors. His ambition has always been towards fundamental understanding on how luminescence color and efficiency changes with type of compound and type of lanthanide. Dorenbos developed various models to explain and predict the electronic structure, i.e. the electronic level locations of the lanthanides with respect to the conduction and valence band and with respect to the vacuum level. Those models are widely adopted in the field, and extremely useful to understand and predict luminescence properties. They even pave the way for research by rational design instead of serendipity. In recognition of his work he received in 2018 the Centennial outstanding achievement award from the Luminescence and Display Materials Division of the Electrochemical society.

Dorenbos has an Hirsch index of 68 and (co)-authored more than 415 peer reviewed papers in scientific journals that were cited more than 18600 times (situation March 2019).