A constant-velocity Mössbauer spectrometer with controlled temperature sweep

A constant-velocity Mossbauer spectrometer with controlled temperature sweep of the sample is presented. The equipment was developed for Mossbauer thermal scanning experiments, allowing the determination of the evolution of the magnetic hyperfine field with temperature. It is based in a three level architecture implemented in a medium sized personal computer (PC). The instrument runs the widely used Linux operating system, supporting several custom microprocessor-based boards, extending the hardware capabilities of the PC. This scheme optimizes the required time for the experiment, exploiting in the background the full capabilities of modern multitasking operating systems in terms of networking, graphical user interfaces, and data storage. The prototype was tested applying the method to the simplest case, i.e., a symmetric sextet collapsing into a singlet. It was found that required times are an order of magnitude smaller than those demanded by the conventional methodology. The results obtained for the 57...