Abstract

Synchrotron pulses will excite low lying nuclear levels, and in crystals, will create nuclear exciton states which are spatially coherent superpositions of the various excited state hyperfine levels of all the nuclei in the crystal. The subsequent radiative decay is radically affected by coherence, exhibiting both a speed-up due to "coherent enhancement", and a quantum beat modulation of the decay rate which gives a periodic speed-up/slow-down of the rate for photon decay into the coherent channels. For a nuclear exciton in an antiferromagnet, the quantum beat modulation will result in an interesting "temporal pendulösung" effect.

© 1988 Optical Society of America