The neutron-rich nucleus 144 Ba (t 1/2 =11.5 s) is expected to exhibit some of the strongest octupole correlations among nuclei with mass numbers A less than 200. Until now, indirect evidence for such strong correlations has been inferred from observations such as enhanced E1 transitions and interleaving positive-and negative-parity levels in the ground-state band. In this experiment, the octupole strength was measured directly by sub-barrier, multi-step Coulomb excitation of a postaccelerated 650-MeV 144 Ba beam on a 1.0-mg/cm 2 208 Pb target. The measured value of the matrix element, 3 − 1 M(E3) 0 + 1 = 0.65( +17 −23 ) eb 3/2 , corresponds to a reduced B(E3) transition probability of 48( +25 −34 ) W.u. This result represents an unambiguous determination of the octupole collectivity, is larger than any available theoretical prediction, and is consistent with octupole deformation.

No abstract

Sm (25). We prepared spectroscopic alpha sources (20-100 μg) from the three activations and counted them during several months using a silicon surface-barrier detector at Kanazawa University (Fig. 1, 25 Galactic-disk enrichment in low-metallicity gas (Fig. 3). This reduces the age of late events (≥ 50 Ma) (age is measured in this work relative to the birth of the solar system) but has a minor effect on earlier events (Table 1). Samarium-146 observations in terrestrial samples can be divided into two groups: (i) most terrestrial rocks display a 142 Nd/ 144 Nd ratio higher by ~18 parts per million (ppm) than CHUR (9) and (ii) anomalies in the 142 Nd/ 144 Nd ratio relative to the terrestrial standard, both positive, in rocks from Greenland and Australia (2,10), and negative, in rocks from Northern Quebec (2,11).

No abstract

No abstract