A dual Mössbauer spectrometer for material research, coincidence experiments and nuclear quantum optics

Abstract

A newly developed dual Mössbauer spectrometer with an integrated time-to-digital converter (TDC) is described in detail. This spectrometer enables variety of Mössbauer experiments in the transmission, emission and resonant configuration as well as coincidence experiments and time differential Mössbauer spectroscopy (TDMS). The device allows investigation of gamma pulses, gamma echos or quantum beats. Thus, it is suitable not only for material research but also for nuclear quantum optics. The dual spectrometer also brings new possibilities to Mössbauer spectroscopy such as an easy determination of a Lamb–Mössbauer factor. The wide functionality of the device comes from an employment of a microcontroller together with FPGA, which is utilized for TDC implementation and a fast signal processing. The performance of the developed spectrometer is demonstrated on several experiments.