... was discovered in 1958 by the German physicist Rudolf Mössbauer. Also known as "recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence", it involves the resonant and recoil–free emission and absorption of gamma radiation by atomic nuclei bound in a solid. Its main application is in Mössbauer spectroscopy, which (like nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy) probes tiny changes in the energy levels of an atomic nucleus in response to its environment.
Mössbauer's discovery won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961.
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