An Exactly Solvable Model for the Decay of Superdeformed Nuclei
Bruce Barrett
Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
The history and importance of superdeformation in nuclei will be briefly discussed. A simple two-level model, which treats the tunneling potential and the electromagnetic processes on the same footing, is then employed to obtain an elegant expression for the branching ratio for the decay via the E1 process in the normal-deformed band of superdeformed nuclei. From this expression, the spreading (or tunneling) width for superdeformed decay is found to be determined completely by experimentally known quantities. By using a statistical model of the energy levels in the normal-deformed well, we can obtain a probabilistic expression for the tunneling matrix element V. Furthermore, the accuracy of the two-level approximation is verfied by the effects of other normal-deformed states.