Speaker
Description
Some years ago, unnatural-parity doublet states in 212Po with spins of 4-, 6-, and 8-, which were observed to decay via strong E1 transitions to the yrast band in an experiment performed with the EUROBALL spectrometer, were interpreted as being of alpha-cluster structure. Subsequent theoretical work seemed to support this interpretation. The aim of experiment E693 was to study the alpha-cluster properties of the nucleus 212Po in more detail. Although the experiment was seriously hampered by target problems, its analysis still led to very important conclusions. The new experimental information, together with a detailled comparison with shell-model calculations, suggests that the states of interest have positive rather than negative parity and decay via strong M1 transitions.
