Radioactive ion beams in solid state physics

Abstract

The use of radioactive beams in solid state physics has become more and more popular during the past few years, and both off–line and on–line mass separators are used for implanting various types of radioactive isotopes into the material under investigation. Besides the nuclear techniques of Mössbauer spectroscopy, perturbed angular correlation spectroscopy, β–NMR, or the ion–beam technique of emission channelling, a new group of radiotracer techniques has been established, which combines radioactive probe atoms with conventional semiconductor physics methods such as deep–level transient spectroscopy, capacitance–voltage measurements, Hall–effect measurements, or photoluminescence spectroscopy. This paper aims to give an idea of the potential of modern ‘radioactive solid state physics’ by describing some typical experiments.