Decay properties of 68,69,70Mn: Probing collectivity up to N=44 in Fe isotopic chain

6 pags.; 4 figs.; This is an open access article under the CC BY license. Funded by SCOAP© 2015 The Authors. The β decays Mn68→Fe68, Mn69→Fe69 and Mn70→Fe70 have been measured at the RIBF facility at RIKEN using the EURICA γ spectrometer combined with an active stopper consisting of a stack of Si detectors. The nuclei were produced as fission fragments from a beam of 238U at a bombarding energy of 345 MeV/nucleon impinging on a Be target and selected using the BigRIPS separator. Half-lives and β-delayed neutron emission probabilities have been extracted for these decays, together with first experimental information on excited states populated in 69,70Fe. The data indicate a continuously increasing deformation for Fe isotopes up to A=70. This is interpreted, as for Cr isotopes, in terms of the interplay between the quadrupole correlations of the ν1d5/2 and ν0g9/2 orbitals and the monopole component of the π0f7/2-ν0f5/2 interaction.The project is co-financed by the European Union and the European Social Fund. This work was supported by NuPNET-ERANET within the NuPNET GANAS project, under grant agreement No. 202914 and from the European Union, within the 7th Framework Program FP7/2007-2013, under grant agreement No. 262010 ENSAR-INDESYS. This work was also supported by Programmi di Ricerca Scientifica di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN) number 2001024324_01302. We here acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under Contracts No. FPA2009-13377-C02 and No. FPA2011-29854-C04, the Hungarian Research Fund OTKA contract numbers K100835 and NN104543, the European Commission through the Marie Curie Actions Contract No. PIEFGA-2001-30096 and by Japanese JSPS KAKENHI Grants No. 24740188 and No. 25247045.Peer Reviewe