Construct · 1 fields · 4 citations

Mossbauer effect: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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Mossbauereffect1 CONSTRUCTMossbauer effectMOSSBAUER · RECOILLESS

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Physics

Recoilless nuclear resonant absorption and emission of gamma rays

Rudolf Mössbauer first reported the effect in 1958 (Zeitschrift für Physik), showing that a nucleus locked in a solid can emit or absorb a gamma-ray photon without losing energy to recoil, because the whole crystal lattice, rather than the single nucleus, takes up the tiny momentum kick. In a free atom that recoil shifts the photon's energy just enough to spoil the resonance, so a gamma ray emitted by one nucleus cannot normally be reabsorbed by an identical one; the recoilless fraction of events in a solid keeps the emitted and absorbed gamma lines extremely narrow, sharp enough that changes in energy of about one part in a trillion become measurable. Because the resonance is so narrow, it is read out by Mössbauer spectroscopy, in which small changes in a nucleus's surroundings, such as its surrounding electron density, its local magnetic field, and its electric field gradient, appear as measurable shifts and splittings of the gamma line (Kistner & Sunyar, 1960; Gütlich, Bill & Trautwein, 2011), and the same precision let Pound and Rebka detect the gravitational redshift of light over a 22-metre tower in 1960. Mössbauer received the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery. As a landmark, it is a routine laboratory method that resolves differences among nuclear energy levels at a resolution finer than the natural linewidth of the transition, a scale unreachable by most other techniques.[1][2][3][4]

Unit
A physical phenomenon, recoilless nuclear resonance, characterised by the recoilless fraction and by line shifts and splittings reported in energy or in source-velocity (mm/s) units
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified and quantified by Mössbauer spectroscopy: a radioactive gamma source is moved at velocities of a few millimetres per second to Doppler-tune the photon energy, and transmission through an absorber is recorded to map the resonance line, its shift, and its splittings

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Nearby constructs

resonance6 fields · 13 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsgamma3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsabsorption6 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, six constructs

References

  1. Mössbauer, R. L. (1958). Kernresonanzfluoreszenz von Gammastrahlung in Ir191. Zeitschrift für Physik, 151(2), 124–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01344210
  2. Kistner, O. C., & Sunyar, A. W. (1960). Evidence for quadrupole interaction of Fe57m, and influence of chemical binding on nuclear gamma-ray energy. Physical Review Letters, 4(8), 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.4.412
  3. Pound, R. V., & Rebka, G. A. (1960). Apparent weight of photons. Physical Review Letters, 4(7), 337–341. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.4.337
  4. Gütlich, P., Bill, E., & Trautwein, A. X. (2011). Mössbauer spectroscopy and transition metal chemistry: Fundamentals and applications. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88428-6

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