Mößbauer spectroscopy

Mössbauer spectroscopy is a spectroscopic technique based on the Mössbauer effect. This effect, discovered by Rudolf Mössbauer (also Moessbauer, German: "Mößbauer") in 1958, consists in the nearly recoil-free, resonant absorption and emission of gamma rays in solids.

Like nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, Mössbauer spectroscopy probes tiny changes in the energy levels of an atomic nucleus in response to its environment. Typically, three types of nuclear interactions may be observed: isomer shift, also called chemical shift in the older literature; quadrupole splitting; and magnetic hyperfine splitting (see also the Zeeman effect). Due to the high energy and extremely narrow line widths of gamma rays, Mössbauer spectroscopy is a very sensitive technique in terms of energy (and hence frequency) resolution, capable of detecting changes in just a few parts per 10¹¹.

Just as a gun recoils when a bullet is fired, conservation of momentum requires a nucleus (such as in a gas) to recoil during emission or absorption of a gamma ray. If a nucleus at rest emits a gamma ray, the energy of the gamma ray is slightly less than the natural energy of the transition, but in order for a nucleus at rest to absorb a gamma ray, the gamma ray's energy must be slightly greater than the natural energy, because in both cases energy is lost to recoil. This means that nuclear resonance (emission and absorption of the same gamma ray by identical nuclei) is unobservable with free nuclei, because the shift in energy is too great and the emission and absorption spectra have no significant overlap.

Nuclei in a solid crystal, however, are not free to recoil because they are bound in place in the crystal lattice. When a nucleus in a solid emits or absorbs a gamma ray, some energy can still be lost as recoil energy, but in this case it always occurs in discrete packets called phonons (quantized vibrations of the crystal lattice). Any whole number of phonons can be emitted, including zero, which is known as a "recoil-free" event. In this case conservation of momentum is satisfied by the momentum of the crystal as a whole, so practically no energy is lost.

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