Executive Summary : | In the A = 160 mass region, the doubly magic nature of 146Gd has been identified. The gradual transition between spherical and deformed shape is supposed to be caused by increasing number of neutron holes, when approaching the neutron mid-shell, coupling the particle-hole excitations across the proton shell gap. This interaction is attractive and brings the resulting nuclear states down in energy and increases the collective behavior. The angular momentum of the nucleus is generated by aligning the spins of the nucleons in shell model orbitals resulting in polarization of the core to oblate shape. Irregularities In the yrast line due to shell effects can then lead to high spin isomeric states. Indeed, nuclei in this region have many long lived isomers (ms to seconds) with alpha decay (10% to 100%). In view of the above and survey in Literature, we plan to study high spin excitations in 156,157,158,159Hf and 155,156Lu nuclei using heavy ion fusion reactions. The 48Ti ion beam of 220-230 MeV from accelerator at IUAC, New Delhi will be used on sn targets for the reaction. Recoil Decay Tagging technique using silicon strip detector for alpha particles for mass detection with HYRA along with gamma-gamma coincidence technique employing 16 Ge clover detectors will be used for nuclear structure investigations of the above Hf and Lu nuclei. After Data acquisition at these national centres TIFR, Mumbai and IUAC, New Delhi, the offline analysis will be done at Panjab University, Chandigarh |