Level structures of Ca cast doubt on a doubly magic Ca
S. Chen (Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, RIKEN Nishina Center, Wako, Japan, School of Physics, State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China)
; F. Browne (RIKEN Nishina Center, Wako, Japan); P. Doornenbal (RIKEN Nishina Center, Wako, Japan); J. Lee (Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong); A. Obertelli (IRFU, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, Institut für Kernphysik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, RIKEN Nishina Center, Wako, Japan); et al - Show all 83 authors
Gamma decays were observed in $^{56}$Ca and $^{58}$Ca following quasi-free one-proton knockout reactions from $^{57,59}$Sc beams at ≈200 MeV/nucleon. For $^{56}$Ca, a γ ray transition was measured to be 1456(12) keV, while for $^{58}$Ca an indication for a transition was observed at 1115(34) keV. Both transitions were tentatively assigned as the decays, and were compared to results from ab initio and conventional shell-model approaches. A shell-model calculation in a wide model space with a marginally modified effective nucleon-nucleon interaction depicts excellent agreement with experiment for level energies, two-neutron separation energies, and reaction cross sections, corroborating the formation of a new nuclear shell above the N = 34 shell. Its constituents, the and orbitals, are almost degenerate. This degeneracy precludes the possibility for a doubly magic $^{60}$Ca and potentially drives the dripline of Ca isotopes to $^{70}$Ca or even beyond.