Monday, November 7, 2011, 3:00 PM, room 385E

Beta-decay studies of isotopes in the vicinity of 78Ni: a tool to probe nuclear structure far from stability

Miguel Madurga

(University of Tennessee-Knoxville)

Nuclear beta decay is a powerful tool to study nuclei far away from stability, where the low production rates make studies using direct nuclear reactions unfeasible. Not only does beta-decay offer a clean window to study excited states in the daughter nuclei, but we can study the mother nucleus through the decay strength, which is proportional to the overlap between the mother and daughter wave functions. We have recently finished a comprehensive set of measurements of the beta-decay of nuclei in the neighborhood of the doubly magic 78Ni, Z=28 N=50. The nuclear structure of N=51,52 isotonic chains was investigated. The half lives of the most neutron rich Zn, Ga and Ge isotopes were obtained for the first time. The consequences for nuclear models and astrophysical calculations of the newly obtained half-lives will be discussed.