The proton decays ~ of isobaric analog states of 2or, 20Spb in the reactions 2o7, 2ospb(p ' n) have been studied using a neutron-proton coincidence technique. The width anomaly observed in (p, n) [4] and (p, n~) singles spectra [11] is resolved in the coincident spectra.Formation of isobaric analog states (IAS) in heavy nuclei has been extensively studied by proton elastic and inelastic resonance scattering [1][2][3] and by the (p,n) charge-exchange reaction [4][5][6]. Due to its unique nature, an IAS decays preferentially by proton emission to low-lying states of the final nucleus. Indirect observation of an IAS is therefore possible, and has been made, by detecting proton decay (~) of the isobaric analog state [7][8][9][10][11][12]. The cross section for partial decay by } emission from the IAS of 2~ [8, 13] has been reported to be greater than the (p,n) cross section [6,14] for formation of the same IAS. A similar anomaly exists for the IAS of 2~ [5,6,9]. It would appear that processes other than population of the IAS are contributing to the } yield. In addition to this discrepancy, the widths of the IAS of 2~176 and 2~ as measured in (p,n~) experiments [8, 9, 11], are considerably greater than the widths obtained in (p,n) experiments [4, 6] or in 2~[1] and 2~ [2,3] resonance experiments. To explain these discrepancies, it has been suggested [5] that proton decay of analogs of excited states may contribute to the } yield. However, no direct evidence for the production of these excited analogs has been observed in (p,n) reactions on Pb and Bi, although they were looked for in many neutron spectra [6,14]. Instead, it has been surmised that a proton evaporation and preequilibrium-emission peak underlying the } groups is responsible for excess )' Supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research ~'* Present address: Univ. Birmingham, England '*** Present address: Univ. Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA cross sections and widths [15]. We present data which tend to support this proposition. We have investigated the reaction mechanism of the (p, n}) process in 2~ and in 2~ by detecting the neutron and proton in coincidence. The proton bombarding energy was 25 MeV. Protons were detected at 90 ~ with an E-veto telescope. A neutron time-offlight (TOF) scintillation spectrometer [14] was used to detect the neutrons at 30 ~ with respect to the beam. Pulse-shape discrimination was used to reject gamma rays. To achieve a reasonable coincidence counting rate, the neutron flight path was only 25 cm and the energy resolution 30%. The n-p coincidences were recorded on a magnetic tape and later replayed with appropriate gates to sort out the kinematic region of interest. Figure 1 shows the neutron TOF spectrum for the 2~ target gated by protons between 10 and 12 MeV. The strong peak at 6 MeV corresponds to excitation of the target ground-state analog in ;~ The gating protons include the ~ decays of the IAS to the first three states of 2~ the only states with non-negligible population [8,11]. Th...