How to do resonant nuclear experiments with synchrotron radiation

The use of synchrotron radiation to excite low-lying nuclear resonances is a rapidly developing field showing great promise for hyperfine spectroscopy, phonon spectroscopy and kinetic studies, crystallography, and fundamental physics experiments. Recent technical advances in synchrotron sources, optics, and fast detectors have drastically increased signal rates and expanded the range of samples that can be studied. A typical experiment today uses a high-brightness synchrotron source having X-ray pulses well-separated in time, a meV-bandpass monochromator using perfect crystals of silicon or germanium, a sample containing resonant nuclei, and an avalanche photodiode timing detector. Both coherent and incoherent scattering can be observed; the coherent scattering is used for hyperfine spectroscopy and studies of diffraction interference phenomena, and the incoherent-scattering signal promises to be very useful for phonon spectroscopy and other studies of excitations in condensed systems. At this point seven nuclear isotopes have been used to resonantly scatter synchrotron radiation, but the number is rapidly increasing