Scientific opportunities in nuclear resonance spectroscopy from source-driven revolution

Abstract

From the beginning of its discovery the Mossbauer effect has continued to be one of the most powerful tools with broad applications in diverse areas of science and technology. With the advent of synchrotron radiation sources such as the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) and the Super Photon Ring-8 (SPring-8), the tool has enlarged its scope and delivered new capabilities. The popular techniques most generally used in the field of materials physics, chemical physics, geoscience, and biology are hyperfine spectroscopy via elastic nuclear forward scattering (NFS), vibrational spectroscopy via nuclear inelastic scattering (NRIXS), and, to a lesser extent, diffusional dynamics from quasielastic nuclear forward scattering (QNFS). As we look ahead, new storage rings with enhanced brilliance such as PETRA-III under construction at DESY, Hamburg, and PEP-III in its early design stage at SLAC, Stanford, will provide new and unique science opportunities. In the next two decades, x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), based both on self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE-XFELs) and a seed (SXFELs), with unique time structure, coherence and a five to six orders higher average brilliance will truly revolutionize nuclear resonance applications in a major way. This overview is intended to briefly address the unique radiation characteristics of new sources on the horizon and to provide a glimpse of scientific prospects and dreams in the nuclear resonance field from the new radiation sources. We anticipate an expanded nuclear resonance research activity with applications such as spin and phonon mapping of a single nanostructure and their assemblies, interfaces, and surfaces; spin dynamics; nonequilibrium dynamics; photochemical reactions; excited-state spectroscopy; and nonlinear phenomena.