Nuclear Excitation by Electron Capture

In 1976, Goldanskii and Namiot proposed the possibility of inducing a nuclear excitation through the inverse process of internal electron conversion (IIEC) [2, 3]. Being simply its time reversal, IIEC is a resonant mechanism involving the excitation of the nucleus via the capture of a free electron in an empty shell, provided that the sum of the energy of the free electron \(E_\textrm{r}\) and the binding energy \(E_\textrm{b}\) of the orbital matches the nuclear transition ( \(E_\textrm{n}\) ), as shown in Fig. 3.1.