Speaker
Description
Nuclei in the rare-earth region with proton numbers between 50–82 and neutron numbers between 82–126 are of particular interest due to the evolution of their nuclear shapes and the interplay between collective motion and single-particle behavior. To investigate these two modes of nuclear motion, the even–even isotope 176Yb and the even–odd isotope 177Yb were selected for study using gamma-ray spectroscopy. Contrary to the purely collective description of the 176Yb ground-band excitations, the excited states of 177Yb nucleus can be interpreted in terms of single-particle excitations. Excited states of these isotopes were populated through Coulomb excitation and 1n-transfer reactions in an experiment conducted at IFIN-HH in Magurele, Romania. In the experiment, a monoisotopic 176Yb target was bombarded with 9Be ions at 38 MeV, and the emitted gamma rays were detected using the RoSPHERE array, comprising 10 HPGe and 15 LaBr3(Ce) detectors. Analysis of the gamma-spectroscopy data contributes to the assessment of existing information in this mass region of N=104, while ongoing work aims to provide further insights about the nuclear structure of these rare-earth isotopes, where experimental data remain scarce.