Physical Review Letters
Author:
Keywords:
Science & Technology, Physical Sciences, Physics, Multidisciplinary, Physics, NEUTRON-RICH, FISSION FRAGMENTS, CHARGE RADII, STATES, ISOTOPES, ZR, SPECTROMETER, PERFORMANCE, EVOLUTION, NUCLEI, 01 Mathematical Sciences, 02 Physical Sciences, 09 Engineering, General Physics, 40 Engineering, 49 Mathematical sciences, 51 Physical sciences
Abstract:
The lifetimes of the first excited 2^{+}, 4^{+}, and 6^{+} states in ^{98}Zr were measured with the recoil-distance Doppler shift method in an experiment performed at GANIL. Excited states in ^{98}Zr were populated using the fission reaction between a 6.2 MeV/u ^{238}U beam and a ^{9}Be target. The γ rays were detected with the EXOGAM array in correlation with the fission fragments identified by mass and atomic number in the VAMOS++ spectrometer. Our result shows a very small B(E2;2_{1}^{+}→0_{1}^{+}) value in ^{98}Zr, thereby confirming the very sudden onset of collectivity at N=60. The experimental results are compared to large-scale Monte Carlo shell model and beyond-mean-field calculations. The present results indicate the coexistence of two additional deformed shapes in this nucleus along with the spherical ground state.