Amorphous alloys Mossbauer effect spectroscopy

Mossbauer spectroscopy and NMR spectroscopy have in common that they provide information which is basically local in character. Up to now the Mossbauer effect has been more fruitfully applied to amorphous alloys than NMR. There are several reasons for this. In ferromagnetic materials the NMR can give rise to much more accurate values of the hyperfine fields than the Mossbauer effect. Owing to the extremely large line broadening this advantage is lost in amorphous alloys. 

Numerous physical techniques have been used to characterize the bulk and the surface of amorphous phases, including X-ray, AES, SEM, XPS, Mossbauer spectroscopy (MOS) and STM. MOS has been able to highlight the state of Fe in a elec-trodeposited FeP alloy [573]. Three different non-equivalent positions of Fe with different Fe-P distances have been identified. In Feg3P7, 16% of Fe is in the amorphous state. This indicates the extent by which the properties of these phases can be controlled. STM of FeCo alloys has shown that the surface may possess properties depending on the size of the homogeneous zones (cf. particle size effect) [588]. 

---