Bentley, PM and Kilcoyne, SH 2006, 'Determination of hyperfine field distributions in amorphous magnets' , Journal of Physics Condensed Matter, 18 , pp. 7751-7759.

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Abstract

We present an overview of two leading methods of determining probability distributions from M¨ossbauer spectra, using the model amorphous magnet Fe80B20. A comparison is made between the maximum-entropy method, which permits analysis using truly arbitrary parameter probability distributions, and a Voigtian-based analysis, which uses a sum of Gaussian components to create parameter distributions of pseudo-arbitrary shape. Our results indicate that, in Fe80B20, a Gaussian distribution of magnetic hyperfine fields is a very good approximation, although small deviations from a Gaussian shape are evident. We find that the apparent existence of correlations between the isomer shift and magnetic hyperfine field parameters, as found using Voigt-based analyses, may be an artefact of imposing a Gaussian shape on the parameter distributions. We conclude that maximum entropy and Voigtian analyses together provide a very powerful means of characterizing magnetic materials with M¨ossbauer spectroscopy.

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