Investigations of nuclear chirality at iThemba LABS

Abstract

Progress in the studies of chirality in atomic nuclei at iThemba LABS is reviewed. New regions of chirality, around mass 80 and 190 have been discovered using the AFRODITE array, specifically in the nuclei ⁷⁴As, ^78,80,82Br, ⁸¹Kr, and ^193,194,198Tl. Many phenomena have been observed, including multiple chiral bands in the same nucleus, the coexistence of octupole correlations and nuclear chirality, and the coexistence of pseudo spin and nuclear chirality. The best example of chiral degeneracy to date was found in ¹⁹⁴Tl. The level scheme of ¹⁰⁶Ag has been revisited and interpreted in terms of two- and four-quasiparticle bands. Investigations using the particle-rotor model have shown that the fingerprints of chirality in the two-quasiparticle system only can occur in an idealised model description. For systems with a higher number of quasiparticles, the calculations showed that nuclear chirality can persist.