Ion Implantation Aids Solid‐State and Nuclear Research

Recently a technique has been developed that uses the recoil energy of Coulomb‐excited nuclei to implant them in a crystal lattice. The excited nuclei can easily be aligned, and useful information about the nuclear levels themselves, as well as the crystal in which they are implanted, can be extracted from the characteristic gamma-ray angular distributions. Magnetic moments of excited $2+$ and $4+$ states have been determined in this way. Useful information about the lattice also can be obtained by studying the emitted gamma rays with the Mössbauer effect.