Speaker
Description
Radiative proton capture is among the reaction mechanisms used for investigating nuclear structure in the quasi-continuum region. The nuclear level density (NLD) is high in the quasi-continuum region and the study of decays from individual states is not feasible. Instead, information on the decay is obtained through the statistical treatment of decay probabilities such as the photon strength function (PSF) [1]. In the current study, we utilize the $^{60}\mathrm{Ni}(p,\gamma)^{61}\mathrm{Cu}$ reaction to investigate the PSF for $^{61}\mathrm{Cu}$ below the neutron separation threshold. The experiment was conducted using the low-energy nuclear physics beam line at the 3 MV Tandetron facility of the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences (iThemba LABS) with incident proton beam energies in the range of 2.3-4.3 MeV. This populated excited states in the $^{61}\mathrm{Cu}$ compound nucleus between 7.03 and 9.01 MeV. The emitted gamma rays were detected using Compton suppressed hyper pure germanium (HPGe) and large volume lanthanum bromide (LaBr3) detectors.
The study focuses on the extraction of the shape of PSF through the use of the Shape Method [2]. The results will provide more insight into the $^{61}\mathrm{Cu}$ PSF via direct decays to the ground state and low-lying excited levels.
Preliminary results on the PSF from partial decays to the ground state will be presented.
References
1. S. Goriely et al., Eur. Phys. J. A 55, 172 (2019).
2. M. Wiedeking et al. Phys. Rev.C 104, 014311 (2021).
This research work is supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant No:118846, 92600, 90741, 92789 and REP-SARC180529336567). It is also based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.