Properties of warm nuclei in the quasi-continuum

Abstract

Nuclear thermodynamic quantities are extracted from nuclear level densities measured with the CACTUS detector array at the Oslo Cyclotron Laboratory. The experiments are performed with light-particle inelastic or transfer reactions. A simple combinatorial model is used to describe the underlying mechanisms responsible for the exponential increasing level density as function of excitation energy. The calculated number of broken Cooper pairs and the parity distribution in continuum are discussed.