Universality of Decay out of Superdeformed Bands in the 190 Mass Region

Abstract

Superdeformed nuclei in the 190 mass region exhibit a striking universality in their decay-out profiles. We show that this universality can be explained in the two-level model of superdeformed decay as related to a strong separation of energy scales: a higher scale related to the nuclear interactions, and a lower scale caused by electromagnetic decay. Furthermore, we present the results of the two-level model for all decays for which sufficient data are known, including statistical extraction of the matrix element for tunneling through the potential barrier.

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures. v2: some minor clarifications, minor correction to Fig. 2