Nuclear resonant Bragg scattering:: Measurement of self-diffusion in intermetallics -: art. no. 104305

We report on a technique to measure self-diffusion in solids using nuclear resonant scattering (NRS) of synchrotron radiation: By scattering in Bragg directions we gain access to brittle samples, which cannot be prepared as thin foils as required for transmission experiments. The intermetallic alloy Fe3Si was investigated in order to demonstrate the feasibility of a nontransmission NRS experiment to measure diffusion in nonperfect single crystals. Even though the modeling of the scattering from nonperfect crystals is a difficult task, the shape of the time spectra of nuclear-scattered quanta from our sample could be successfully approximated with a simple model. The diffusion effect, which manifests itself as an "accelerated decay" of the intensity in the time spectra, was observed and the diffusion parameters were obtained.