Seminar Fizičkog odsjeka

Nearly fifty years ago Rudolf L Mössbauer, whilst working on his doctoral thesis under Professor Maier-Leibnitz in Heidelberg, discovered the recoilless nuclear resonance absorption of gamma rays which became known as the Mössbauer Effect. The phenomenon rapidly developed to a new spectroscopic technique which now bears his name.

Mössbauer’s discovery that gamma-ray emission and absorption can occur in a recoil-free fashion might have seemed at first glance to be no more than just an interesting new phenomenon.  However, as soon as it became generally realized that the Mössbauer resonance line is extremely narrow and allows hyperfine interactions to be resolved and evaluated in a rather straightforward way, this handy new method created an avalanche of research activity.  Within a few years nearly all disciplines in the natural sciences enjoyed a boom in the application of Mössbauer spectroscopy.  Some journals were swamped to such an extent that editorials were written to limit the publication of Mössbauer results. Rudolf Mössbauer’s concluding remark concerning the effect that bears his name in his Nobel Laureate speech of December 1961 has proved to be correct and has retained its significance to the present day; it can also be regarded as a prognosis for the future.

Mössbauer spectroscopy has been used in the different branches of natural sciences to draw conclusions about the bonding, internal structure and different hyperfine interaction viz. electric field gradient and hyperfine magnetic fields. We will discuss its applications on some geological Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary samples containing iron minerals.

Voditelj seminara FO

Hrvoje Buljan, hbuljan@phy.hr