In-beam spectroscopy reveals competing nuclear shapes in the rare isotope 62Cr

In recent decades, rare-isotope facilities have enabled the study of short-lived, neutron-rich nuclei. Their measured properties indicate that shell structure changes in the regime of unbalanced neutron-to-proton ratios compared with that of stable nuclei. In the so-called islands of inversion in the nuclear chart—around the neutron-rich nuclei ³²Mg, ⁴²Si and ⁶⁴Cr, for example—the textbook shell model predicts spherical shapes due to the respective magic neutron numbers of 20, 28 and 40 of these nuclei. However, nuclei in these regions turn out to be deformed in their ground states. Another hallmark of these islands is shape coexistence, where a nucleus assumes different shapes with excitation energy. Here we present evidence for this phenomenon from the observation of an excited 0⁺ state in ⁶²Cr, two neutrons away from the heart of the island of inversion around neutron number N = 40. We use large-scale shell-model calculations to interpret the results, and we report extrapolations for the doubly magic nucleus ⁶⁰Ca.