Mossbauer resonance lineshape

In some cases, e.g. in " Np, the resonance lineshape contains in addition tto"the Lorentzian term of eq. (11) a weak dispersion term which has to be taken into account in precise data analysis (Goldwire and Hannon 1977). The situation in " Np is discussed by Asch et al. (1978). Due to the sharpness of F the velocities needed to destroy resonance absorption are quite small, usually in the range of 10 to lOOmm/s. The actual construction of Mossbauer spectrometers will be reviewed briefly in section 3.1. 

A unique situation is encountered if Fe-M6ssbauer spectroscopy is applied for the study of spin-state transitions in iron complexes. The half-life of the excited state of the Fe nucleus involved in the Mossbauer experiment is tj/2 = 0.977 X 10 s which is related to the decay constant k by tj/2 = ln2/fe. The lifetime t = l//c is therefore = 1.410 x 10 s which value is just at the centre of the range estimated for the spin-state lifetime Tl = I/Zclh- Thus both the situations discussed above are expected to appear under suitable conditions in the Mossbauer spectra. The quantity of importance is here the nuclear Larmor precession frequency co . If the spin-state lifetime Tl = 1/feLH is long relative to the nuclear precession time l/co , i.e. Tl > l/o) , individual and sharp resonance lines for the two spin states are observed. On the other hand, if the spin-state lifetime is short and thus < l/o) , averaged spectra with intermediate values of quadrupole splitting A q and isomer shift 5 are found. For the intermediate case where Tl 1/cl , broadened and asymmetric resonance lines are obtained. These may be the subject of a lineshape analysis that will eventually produce values of rate constants for the dynamic spin-state inter-conversion process. The rate constants extracted from the spectra will be necessarily of the order of 10 -10 s"F... 

Spectral lineshapes were first expressed in terms of autocorrelation functions by Foley39 and Anderson.40 Van Kranendonk gave an extensive review of this and attempted to compute the dipolar correlation function for vibration-rotation spectra in the semi-classical approximation.2 The general formalism in its present form is due to Kubo.11 Van Hove related the cross section for thermal neutron scattering to a density autocorrelation function.18 Singwi et al.41 have applied this kind of formalism to the shape of Mossbauer lines, and recently Gordon15 has rederived the formula for the infrared bandshapes and has constructed a physical model for rotational diffusion. There also exists an extensive literature in magnetic resonance where time-correlation functions have been used for more than two decades.8... 

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