The Mössbauer effect involves the resonance fluorescence of nuclear gamma radiation and can be observed during recoilless emission and absorption of radiation in solids. It can be exploited as a spectroscopic method by observing chemically dependent hyperfine interactions. The recent determination of the nuclear radius term in the isomer shift equation for 119 Sn shows that the isomer shift becomes more positive with increasing s electron density at the nucleus. Detailed studies of the temperature dependence of the recoil-free fraction in 119 Sn and 129 I labeled SnI 4 show that the characteristic "Mössbauer temperatures," θ M , are dif ferent for the two atoms. These results are typical of the kind of chemical information which can be obtained from Mössbauer spectra.
RudolphMössbauer in late 1957-1958 attempted to observe γ-ray -•^ resonance in such a way that the recoil energy which is lost in the usual nuclear gamma decay is compensated for by temperature broad ening-the so-called Doppler broadening observed in such γ-ray spectra. He chose iridium-191, with a γ-ray energy of 129 k.e.v. and a free-atom recoil energy of 0.05 e.v. The Doppler broadening at room temperature is such that the width of the gamma line is a factor of 2 larger than this. Therefore, the line emitted by the source and the line that can populate the ground state-first excited state transition in the absorber actually overlap-i.e., the total distance between E t -E R and E t + E B is about the same as the width of one of these lines. Figure 1 represents graphi cally the relationship among the line width, Γ, the transition energy, E t , and the recoil energy, E R .Môssbauer attempted to observe this resonance by studying his system at elevated temperatures, at which the overlap becomes reason-1 The Mössbauer Effect and Its Application in Chemistry Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 79.110.25.164 on 06/23/16. For personal use only.