WNPPC2023 - 60th Winter Nuclear Particle Physics Conference

Searching for Alpha-Cluster States in 126Te

18 Feb 2023, 11:15

15m

KC 303 (Banff Centre)

Contributed Oral Nuclear Structure February 18 Morning Session

Speaker

Frank (Tongan) Wu (Simon Fraser University)

Description

Clustering in nuclei provides an alternative description to their nuclear structure in addition to the Nuclear Shell Model. Although alpha (${}^4$He nucleus) clusters are widely accepted to be essential to the understanding of the structure of light nuclei, such as the Hoyle state in ${}^{12}$C, it was experimentally observed in heavy nuclei only recently in ${}^{212}$Po. The observation showed that ${}^{212}$Po had mixed shell and cluster configurations, where the structure of ${}^{212}$Po could be explained by an alpha cluster coupled to the doubly-magic ${}^{208}$Pb core. In particular, the clustering structure resulted in enhanced $E1$ (electric dipole) transitions from non-natural parity states, which were measured using gamma-ray spectroscopy.

Another recent experiment at INFN Legnaro observed an excess cross section for the parasitic ${}^{122}$Sn(${}^{13}$C,${}^9$Be)${}^{126}$Te reaction. Because the fusion-evaporation cross section for this channel was negligible in PACE4 calculations, the ${}^{126}$Te was likely populated through an alpha transfer reaction which suggests alpha-clustering in its structure. In this experiment gamma rays were detected with the GALILEO array which is composed of 25 Compton-suppressed HPGe detectors while charged particles with particle identification were detected in the EUCLIDES $E-\mathrm{\Delta }E$ $4\pi$ Si-ball array. Gamma-ray spectroscopy with coincidence techniques, such as particle-particle, particle-gamma, and gamma-gamma, is underway to extract previously unobserved transitions and levels in ${}^{126}$Te from this data set. Preliminary results from the Legnaro data, together with plans for a future experiment, will be presented and discussed.

Presentation materials

FWu_WNPPC2023.pdf