On-demand acoustic shaping of Mossbauer gamma-ray photons

We propose a technique that makes it possible to transform the intensity of a quasi-monochromatic single-photon wave packet, emitted by a radioactive Mössbauer gamma-ray source, into a sequence of short bursts with an arbitrary number of bursts, including a single burst. In addition, the technique allows one to individually and independently control, on demand, the moments of the burst appearance, as well as the peak intensity, duration and shape of each burst in the sequence. The technique is based on the transmission of Mössbauer (recoilless) photons through a resonantly absorbing medium, which is rapidly displaced at some moments of time relative to the source (or vice versa) along the photon propagation direction at a distance less than the photon wavelength, and returned to its original position. The burst durations can be comparable to the duration of the single-photon pulses produced by synchrotrons but have the controlled spectral-temporal characteristics. We show that the proposed technique can be implemented on the basis of currently available equipment with use of 14.4-keV recoilless photons, emitted by Co-57 source, and Fe-57 absorber, which opens up prospects for its applications in Mössbauer spectroscopy and x-ray quantum optics.