Gamma-ray Spectroscopy of Excited States in 61Zn

The Zn-61(30)31 isotope has been produced at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the fusion-evaporation reaction Ca-40(Mg-24, 2pn)Zn-61 at 104 MeV. The experimental set-up allowed gamma-rays to be detected in the CLARION Ge detector array in coincidence with the detection of recoiling nuclei in the focal plane at the end of the recoil mass spectrometer. This provides a unique identification of gamma-rays belonging to Zn-61. The excited states have been explored by means of recoil-gamma gamma coincidences, and the resulting decay scheme comprises almost 70 transitions. The data reveal numerous non-yrast states and suggest a revised spin and parity assignment for a previously observed superdeformed band. The resulting decay scheme is compared to predictions from different sets of large-scale shell model calculations