INHOMOGENEOUS AND HOMOGENEOUS BROADENING EFFECTS ON NUCLEAR-RESONANCEEXPERIMENTS

Inhomogeneous broadening of resonance lines causes a reduction of abso rption in nuclear resonance experiments. This is particularly devastat ing to the observation of the Mossbauer effect in isomers like Ag-107 with a half-life of 44 s. It has been suggested in the literature that homogeneous broadening can provide overlap of resonance lines and thu s the Mossbauer effect can be recovered. The analysis presented in thi s paper shows that this is not the case for Mossbauer experiments, unl ess the radiative width Gamma(gamma) also increases. Although overlap occurs when the lines are homogeneously broadened to a total width Gam ma(H) which exceeds the natural width Gamma, and the inhomogeneous wid th Delta, the Mossbauer absorption remains low because it is proportio nal to the factor of Gamma(gamma)/Gamma(H).