We study the thermal properties of 54 Fe with the Brown-Richter interaction in the complete 1p0f model space. Monte Carlo calculations show a peak in the heat capacity and rapid increases in both the moment of inertia and M 1 strength near a temperature of 1.1 MeV that are associated with the vanishing of proton-proton and neutron-neutron monopole pair correlations; neutron-proton correlations persist to higher temperatures. Our results are consistent with a Fermi gas level density whose back-shift vanishes with increasing temperature.PACS numbers: 21.60. Cs, 21.60.Ka, 27.40.+z, 21.10.Ma Typeset using REVT E X 1 The nuclear level density increases rapidly at excitation energies above several MeV and it becomes difficult to resolve or calculate individual states. In this regime, it is more appropriate to employ a statistical description where observables are averaged over the many levels at a given energy. The concept of an equilibrated compound nucleus is among the most fundamental of nuclear reaction theories [1], and plays a central role in our understanding of processes induced by probes ranging from photons to heavy ions.While the proper description of a compound nucleus is in terms of a microcanonical (fixed-energy) ensemble, it is often more convenient to consider a canonical ensemble whose temperature is chosen to reproduce the average excitation energy. In the past decade, there has been renewed experimental [2] and theoretical [3] effort to explore the properties of heavy nuclei at finite temperature and high spin. The properties of hot nuclei are also important in various astrophysical scenarios, particularly in the late stage of a supernova collapse and explosion [4].Most theoretical approaches to hot nuclei devolve to a mean-field description based on an average configuration [5]. The realization that thermal and quantal fluctuations about the average can be important has prompted more sophisticated approximations [6], although even these have clear limitations. In principle, the nuclear shell model (which provides a complete spectrum and wavefunctions) offers a fully microscopic approach to the problem.However, conventional finite-temperature shell model calculations within a complete major shell are limited to light nuclei ( 20 Ne and 24 Mg) in the sd shell [7].In this Letter, we exploit recently developed Monte Carlo techniques to calculate the thermal properties of 54 Fe in a complete 0hω model space with a realistic interaction. The methods we use describe the nucleus by a canonical ensemble at temperature T = β −1 and employ a Hubbard-Stratonovich linearization of the imaginary-time many-body propagator, e −βH , to express observables as path integrals of one-body propagators in fluctuating auxiliary fields [8]. Since Monte Carlo techniques avoid an explicit enumeration of the manybody states, they can be used in model spaces far larger than those accessible to conventional methods. The Monte Carlo results are in principle exact and are in practice subject only to 2 controllable samp...