A constant-velocity Mössbauer spectrometer with controlled temperature sweep

A. VEIGA; N. MARTINEZ; M. MAYOSKY; E. ESPINELLI; P. MENDOZA ZÉLIS; G. A. PASQUEVICH; F. H. SÁNCHEZ

REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS

Año: 2002 vol. 73 p. 3579 - 3583

0034-6748

A constant-velocity Mo¨ssbauer spectrometer with controlled temperature sweep of the sample ispresented. The equipment was developed for Mo¨ssbauer thermal scanning experiments, allowing thedetermination of the evolution of the magnetic hyperfine field with temperature. It is based in a threelevel architecture implemented in a medium sized personal computer ~PC!. The instrument runs thewidely used Linux operating system, supporting several custom microprocessor-based boards,extending the hardware capabilities of the PC. This scheme optimizes the required time for theexperiment, exploiting in the background the full capabilities of modern multitasking operatingsystems in terms of networking, graphical user interfaces, and data storage. The prototype was testedapplying the method to the simplest case, i.e., a symmetric sextet collapsing into a singlet. It wasfound that required times are an order of magnitude smaller than those demanded by theconventional methodology. The results obtained for the 57Fe temperature hyperfine field dependenceare in good agreement with those obtained by conventional Mo¨ssbauer spectroscopy. More complexsituations must be explored both experimentally and theoretically. It must be mentioned that thepresented layout is actually a general tool for automation of experiments at a relative low cost.