Speaker
Description
The neutron-rich rare-earth nuclei, lying between the doubly magic tin-132 and lead-208, are expected to exhibit a wealth of shape phenomena. This includes the development of large quadrupole deformations which are expected to reach maxima in the mid-shell region corresponding to Z~66 and N~104. Indeed, the nucleus dysprosium-170 exhibits the largest E(4+)/E(2+) ratio in this region, corresponding to 3.32, which is close to the value expected for a rigid rotor. Beyond the measurement of the energies of excited states, very little spectroscopic data is available in these rare-earth nuclei. For example, there remains a paucity of information regarding electric quadrupole transition probabilities, and therefore electric quadrupole moments, in nuclei in this region of the nuclear chart. This is, in part, due to the difficulty associated with populating high-spin states in these neutron-rich nuclei. This talk will motivate the use of neutron-transfer reactions to populate high-spin states in such nuclei and outline plans to perform these reactions at HIL. In addition, this talk will discuss how these experiments could benefit from the availability of apparatus, at HIL, capable of performing gamma-ray fast-timing measurements.
