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The nuclear level density is a fundamental quantity in nuclear physics, governing various nuclear reactions and astrophysical processes. In this study, we report on the collective enhancement of nuclear level density and its fade-out with excitation energy in the deformed $^{161}$Dy, obtained through an exclusive measurement of neutron evaporation spectra. The $^{162}$Dy nucleus was populated via the transfer of a triton in a $^{7}$Li-induced reaction on $^{159}$Tb. Statistical model analysis of the neutron spectra revealed a large collective enhancement factor of 42$\pm$2, consistent with microscopic calculations. This enhancement factor is similar to the one obtained for mass A$\sim$170 in our previous measurement. The energy-dependent collective enhancement over a wide range of excitation energies was inferred by combining the present results with the available Oslo level density below the neutron binding energy., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Accepted in Physical Review C

The collective enhancement of nuclear level density and its fade out with excitation energy in deformed $^{171}$Yb nucleus has been inferred through an exclusive measurement of neutron spectra.The statistical model analysis of neutron spectra demonstrated a large collective enhancement factor of 40$\pm$3 for the first time, which corroborates with the recent microscopic model predictions but is an anomalous result compared with the measurements in the nearby deformed nuclei. The complete picture of the energy dependent collective enhancement has been obtained by combining with Oslo data below neutron binding energy. The significance of large collective enhancement in radiative neutron capture cross section of astrophysical interest is highlighted., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

A comprehensive test of level density models for explaining the decay of excited compound nuclei, 54 Mn, 56 Fe, 58 Co, 60 Ni, 61 Ni and 63 Cu, in the energy range of 28 - 36 MeV has been performed. The compound nuclei of interest in the desired ranges are populated using 6 Li based transfer reactions. The proton decay spectrum for each excitation energy bins has been measured. The measured proton spectrum has been reproduced using statistical model calculations with different level density models. A variance minimised approach has been employed for analysing the prediction capability of different level density models. This approach has been converged to Gogny Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov(HFB) microscopic level density model and which is attributed as the most accurate model for the desired nuclei.

In this work, the orientation adapter, a species of active particles that adapt their direction of motion from the other active particles, is introduced. The orientation adapters exist besides the usual Vicsek-like particles; both are self-driven, however, follow different interaction rules. We have studied the dynamics in high speed of the particles keeping dissimilar speeds for these different species. The effect of orientation adapters on the collective behaviour of the system is explored in this model. The orientational order-disorder phase transition is mainly studied in such systems. First, for equal density of both species, when the adapter speed $v_a=1.2v_0$ and usual particles speed $v_0=1.0$, both adapters and the usual particles form dense travelling bands and move in the same direction. Near the transition point, such bands appear and disappear over time, giving rise to the co-existence of two phases. The adapters and the usual particles both undergo a discontinuous transition. The nature of the transition is further confirmed by the existence of hysteresis in the order parameter under a continuously varying noise field. However, when the adapter velocity becomes much higher than the usual SPPs $v_a \approx 7v_0$, the formation of travelling bands disappears from the system, and the transition becomes continuous. The density ratio is also varied, keeping the velocities constant, and the phase transition is studied. For a high adapter velocity with $v_a=10v_0$, the continuous transition is found with low-density values of the adapters. The critical exponents related to the continuous transition are also determined., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2208.00723

Mass distributions of fission fragments arising from the slow quasi-fission process have been derived by comparing the measured distributions with the theoretical distributions based on compound nuclear fission model for several reactions. The mass-distributions corresponding to quasi-fission events for all the systems show the following common features: (1) they are double peaked with fixed peak-centroids and nearly same width at different incident energies, (2) the yield of quasi-fission events decreases with the increasing projectile energy, and (3) peak corresponding to lighter fragment is observed at A $\sim$ 96 for all the systems, whereas the peak of heavier fragment increases linearly with the mass of the di-nuclear system. All the above observations are quite similar to the ones observed in well known asymmetric fission of actinides, thus providing clear evidences of shell effect in slow quasi-fission where the lighter fragment is possibly nuclei around $^{96}$Zr, a new doubly magic nucleus. This finding has great implications in the study of nuclear reactions, structure and particularly in super-heavy element synthesis where quasi-fission is synonymous.

The photo nuclear reaction cross section of $^{61}$Ni($\gamma$,xp) reaction have been measured by employing surrogate reaction technique. This indirect method is used for the first time to obtain the cross section of photo nuclear reaction. The compound nucleus $^{61}$Ni$^{*}$ was populated using the transfer reaction $^{59}$Co($^{6}$Li,$\alpha$) at E$_{lab}=$ 40.5 MeV. To calculate the surrogate ratio, $^{60}$Ni($\gamma$,xp) was selected as reference reaction and the corresponding compound nucleus $^{60}$Ni$^{*}$ was populated using the transfer reaction $^{56}$Fe($^{6}$Li,d) at E$_{lab}=$ 35.9 MeV. The experimental cross section data of the reference reaction has been taken from EXFOR data libraries. Compound nuclear cross section calculations have been done using EMPIRE 3.2.3 code., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

Elastic scattering angular distribution for weakly bound nucleus $^{6}$Li on the deformed rare earth $^{159}$Tb target nucleus has been measured at energies around the Coulomb barrier. The elastic scattering cross sections for this reaction consist of inelastic contributions from low lying excited states of $^{159}$Tb. The pure elastic cross-sections have been extracted from the admixture of elastic and inelastic data. The optical model potential parameters for the system have been obtained from the extracted pure elastic scattering cross sections. Coupled channel calculations have been performed with this set of potential parameters, to compare the theoretical and experimental inelastic scattering cross sections. The work has been extended to obtain the spectroscopic factor for $^{158}$Tb+n configuration from the experimental 1n-pickup data.

The $^6$Li(n,$\gamma$)$^7$Li cross sections in the neutron energy range of 0.6 to 4 MeV have been measured by the experimental implementation of the direct capture formalism. This was done by measuring the $\gamma$ transition probability experimentally and accounting for the spin factor by theoretical calculation. The electromagnetic transition probabilities from $^7$Li$^*$ analogous to the initial neutron capture states of $^6$Li$+n$ were measured by populating the J$_i$ states of $^7$Li through $^7$Li($p,p'$)$^7$Li$^*$ reaction. The impact of coupling of resonant states, above neutron separation threshold of $^7$Li, in the neutron capture, is observed from the capture $\gamma$ spectrum. The measured cross sections were reproduced through {\sc fresco} and Talys-1.95 Direct Capture Calculations.

The collective behavior of a binary mixture of polar self-propelled particles (SPPs) with different motile properties is studied. The binary mixture consists of slow-moving SPPs (sSPPs) of fixed velocity $v_s$ and fast-moving SPPs (fSPPs) of fixed velocity $v_f$. These SPPs interact via a short-range interaction irrespective of their types. They move following certain position and velocity update rules similar to the Vicsek model (VM) under the influence of an external noise $\eta$. The system is studied at different values of $v_f$ keeping $v_s=0.01$ constant for a fixed density $\rho=0.5$. Different phase-separated collective patterns that appear in the system over a wide range of noise $\eta$ are characterized. The fSPPs and the sSPPs are found to be orientationally phase-synchronized at the steady-state. We studied an orientational order-disorder transition varying the angular noise $\eta$ and identified the critical noise $\eta_c$ for different $v_f$. Interestingly, both the species exhibit continuous transition for $v_f<100v_s$, and discontinuous transition for $v_f>100v_s$. A new set of critical exponents is determined for the continuous transitions. However, the binary model is found to be non-universal as the values of the critical exponents depend on the velocity. The effect of interaction radius on the system behavior is also studied.

We report a measurement of two energy-weighted gamma cascade angular distributions from polarized slow neutron capture on the ${}^{35}$Cl nucleus, one parity-odd correlation proportional to $\vec{s_{n}} \cdot \vec{k_{\gamma}}$ and one parity-even correlation proportional to $\vec{s_{n}} \cdot \vec{k_{n}} \times \vec{k_{\gamma}}$. A parity violating asymmetry can appear in this reaction due to the weak nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction which mixes opposite parity S and P-wave levels in the excited compound $^{36}$Cl nucleus formed upon slow neutron capture. If parity-violating (PV) and parity-conserving (PC) terms both exist, the measured differential cross section can be related to them via $\frac{d\sigma}{d\Omega}\propto1+A_{\gamma, PV}\cos\theta+A_{\gamma,PC}\sin\theta$. The PV and PC asymmetries for energy-weighted gamma cascade angular distributions for polarized slow neutron capture on $^{35}$Cl averaged over the neutron energies from 2.27~meV to 9.53~meV were measured to be $A_{\gamma,PV}=(-23.9\pm0.7)\times 10^{-6}$ and $A_{\gamma,PC}=(0.1\pm0.7)\times 10^{-6}$. These results are consistent with previous experimental results. Systematic errors were quantified and shown to be small compared to the statistical error. These asymmetries in the angular distributions of the gamma rays emitted from the capture of polarized neutrons in $^{35}$Cl were used to verify the operation and data analysis procedures for the NPDGamma experiment which measured the parity-odd asymmetry in the angular distribution of gammas from polarized slow neutron capture on protons.

Background: Multinucleon transfer reactions at energies around the Coulomb barrier offer a vital opportunity to study rich physics of nuclear structure and dynamics. Despite the continuous development in the field, we have still limited knowledge about how deformation - one of the representative nuclear structures - affects multinucleon transfer reactions. Purpose: To shed light on the effect of deformation in multinucleon transfer processes, we study the $^{16}$O+$^{154}$Sm reaction at $E_{\rm lab}$=85 MeV (around the Coulomb barrier) and 134 MeV (substantially above the Coulomb barrier), where the target nucleus, $^{154}$Sm, is a well-established, deformed nucleus. Results: Angular distributions for elastic scattering and for various transfer channels were measured over a wide angular range at the BARC-TIFR pelletron-Linac accelerator facility, Mumbai. The $Q$-value- and angle-integrated isotope production cross sections have been extracted from the measured angular distributions. The experimental data are analyzed along with time-dependent Hartree-Fock calculations. For the lower incident energy case, we find a reasonable agreement between the measurements and the TDHF calculations for a-few-nucleon transfer channels; whereas TDHF underestimates cross sections for many-nucleon transfers, consistent with earlier works. On the other side, we find that calculated cross sections for secondary reaction products for the higher incident energy case, qualitatively explains the measured trends of isotopic distributions observed for the lower energy. The latter observation indicates possible underestimation of excitation energies in the present TDHF+GEMINI analysis. Although certain orientation effects were observed in TDHF results, it is difficult to disentangle them from the $Q$-value- and angle-integrated production cross sections. (Shortened due to the arXiv's length limit.), Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures; v2 - Title has been revised. Analysis of TKEL spectra with two figures (Figs. 3 and 4) has been added. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review C

The formation of continuum neutron distribution in $^7$Li(p,n) has been identified as due to the coupling of the $^7$Be breakup levels to the final state of the reaction. The continuum neutron spectra produced by $^7$Li(p,n) reaction has been estimated by measuring the double differential cross sections for continuum and resonant breakup of $^7$Be, through $^7$Li(p,n)$^7$Be$^*$ reaction at 21 MeV of proton energy. The breakup contributions from continuum and $5/2^-$, $7/2^-$ states of $^7$Be have been identified. The measured double differential cross sections have been reproduced through CDCC-CRC calculations. The cross sections were projected to neutron spectrum using Monte-Carlo approach and validated using experimentally measured $^3$He gated neutron spectra. $^7$Li(p,n) neutron spectrum at 20 MeV incident proton energy measured by McNaughton. et al. has been reproduced by adapting estimated model parameters for the reaction.

Quasielastic scattering excitation function at large backward angle has been measured for the weakly bound system, $^{7}$Li+$^{159}$Tb at energies around the Coulomb barrier. The corresponding quasielastic barrier distribution has been derived from the excitation function, both including and excluding the $\alpha$-particles produced in the reaction. The centroid of the barrier distribution obtained after inclusion of $\alpha$-particles was found to be shifted higher in energy, compared to the distribution excluding the $\alpha $-particles. The quasielastic data, excluding the $\alpha$-particles, have been analyzed in the framework of continuum discretized coupled channel calculations. The quasielastic barrier distribution for $^{7}$Li+$^{159}$Tb, has also been compared with the fusion barrier distribution for the system.

Both the deterministic and stochastic sandpile models are studied on the percolation backbone, a random fractal, generated on a square lattice in $2$-dimensions. In spite of the underline random structure of the backbone, the deterministic Bak Tang Wiesenfeld (BTW) model preserves its positive time auto-correlation and multifractal behaviour due to its complete toppling balance, whereas the critical properties of the stochastic sandpile model (SSM) still exhibits finite size scaling (FSS) as it exhibits on the regular lattices. Analysing the topography of the avalanches, various scaling relations are developed. While for the SSM, the extended set of critical exponents obtained is found to obey various the scaling relation in terms of the fractal dimension $d_f^B$ of the backbone, whereas the deterministic BTW model, on the other hand, does not. As the critical exponents of the SSM defined on the backbone are related to $d_f^B$, the backbone fractal dimension, they are found to be entirely different from those of the SSM defined on the regular lattice as well as on other deterministic fractals. The SSM on the percolation backbone is found to obey FSS but belongs to a new stochastic universality class.

We report the first observation of the parity-violating 2.2 MeV gamma-ray asymmetry $A^{np}_\gamma$ in neutron-proton capture using polarized cold neutrons incident on a liquid parahydrogen target at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. $A^{np}_\gamma$ isolates the $\Delta I=1$, \mbox{$^{3}S_{1}\rightarrow {^{3}P_{1}}$} component of the weak nucleon-nucleon interaction, which is dominated by pion exchange and can be directly related to a single coupling constant in either the DDH meson exchange model or pionless EFT. We measured $A^{np}_\gamma = [-3.0 \pm 1.4 (stat) \pm 0.2 (sys)]\times 10^{-8}$, which implies a DDH weak $\pi NN$ coupling of $h_{\pi}^{1} = [2.6 \pm 1.2(stat) \pm 0.2(sys)] \times 10^{-7}$ and a pionless EFT constant of $C^{^{3}S_{1}\rightarrow ^{3}P_{1}}/C_{0}=[-7.4 \pm 3.5 (stat) \pm 0.5 (sys)] \times 10^{-11}$ MeV$^{-1}$. We describe the experiment, data analysis, systematic uncertainties, and the implications of the result., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

The complete and incomplete fusion cross sections for $^{7}$Li+$^{124}$Sn reaction were measured using online and offline characteristic $\gamma$-ray detection techniques. The complete fusion (CF) cross sections at energies above the Coulomb barrier were found to be suppressed by $\sim$ 26 \% compared to the coupled channel calculations. This suppression observed in complete fusion cross sections is found to be commensurate with the measured total incomplete fusion (ICF) cross sections. There is a distinct feature observed in the ICF cross sections, i.e., $\textit{t}$-capture is found to be dominant than $\alpha$-capture at all the measured energies. A simultaneous explanation of complete, incomplete and total fusion (TF) data was also obtained from the calculations based on Continuum Discretized Coupled Channel method with short range imaginary potentials. The cross section ratios of CF/TF and ICF/TF obtained from the data as well as the calculations showed the dominance of ICF at below barrier energies and CF at above barrier energies., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures

A dissipative stochastic sandpile model is constructed on one and two dimensional small-world networks with different shortcut densities $\phi$ where $\phi=0$ and $1$ represent a regular lattice and a random network respectively. In the small-world regime ($2^{-12} \le \phi \le 0.1$), the critical behaviour of the model is explored studying different geometrical properties of the avalanches as a function of avalanche size $s$. For both the dimensions, three regions of $s$, separated by two crossover sizes $s_1$ and $s_2$ ($s_1s_1$ are sparse as they are on network and follow mean-field scaling. Coexistence of different scaling forms in the small-world regime leads to violation of usual finite-size scaling, in contrary to the fact that the model follows the same on the regular lattice as well as on the random network independently. Simultaneous appearance of multiple scaling forms are characterized by developing a coexistence scaling theory. As SWN evolves from regular lattice to random network, a crossover from diffusive to super-diffusive nature of sand transport is observed and scaling forms of such crossover is developed and verified., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures

The reaction mechanism of deep-inelastic multinucleon transfer processes in the $^{16}$O+$^{27}$Al reaction at an incident $^{16}$O energy ($E_{\rm lab}=134$ MeV) substantially above the Coulomb barrier has been studied both experimentally and theoretically. Elastic-scattering angular distribution, total kinetic energy loss spectra and angular distributions for various transfer channels have been measured. The $Q$-value- and angle-integrated isotope production cross sections have been deduced. To obtain deeper insight into the underlying reaction mechanism, we have carried out a detailed analysis based on the time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) theory. A recently developed method, TDHF+GEMINI, has been applied to evaluate production cross sections for secondary products. From a comparison between the experimental and theoretical cross sections, we find that the theory qualitatively reproduces the experimental data. Significant effects of secondary light-particle emissions are demonstrated. Possible interplay between fusion-fission, deep-inelastic, multinucleon transfer and particle evaporation processes are discussed., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, including Supplemental Material; v2 - two figures and one table added, revised according to the Referee's suggestions

A two state sandpile model with preferential sand distribution is developed and studied numerically on scale free networks with power-law degree ($k$) distribution, {\em i.e.}: $P_k\sim k^{-\alpha}$. In this model, upon toppling of a critical node sand grains are given one to each of the neighbouring nodes with highest and lowest degrees instead of two randomly selected neighbouring nodes as in a stochastic sandpile model. The critical behaviour of the model is determined by characterizing various avalanche properties at the steady state varying the network structure from scale free to random, tuning $\alpha$ from $2$ to $5$. The model exhibits mean field scaling on the random networks, $\alpha>4$. However, in the scale free regime, $2<\alpha<4$, the scaling behaviour of the model not only deviates from the mean-field scaling but also the exponents describing the scaling behaviour are found to decrease continuously as $\alpha$ decreases. In this regime, the critical exponents of the present model are found to be different from those of the two state stochastic sandpile model on similar networks. The preferential sand distribution thus has non-trivial effects on the sandpile dynamics which leads the model to a new universality class., Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures

A random growth lattice filling model of percolation with touch and stop growth rule is developed and studied numerically on a two dimensional square lattice. Nucleation centers are continuously added one at a time to the empty sites and the clusters are grown from these nucleation centers with a tunable growth probability g. As the growth probability g is varied from 0 to 1 two distinct regimes are found to occur. For g\le 0.5, the model exhibits continuous percolation transitions as ordinary percolation whereas for g\ge 0.8 the model exhibits discontinuous percolation transitions. The discontinuous transition is characterized by discontinuous jump in the order parameter, compact spanning cluster and absence of power law scaling of cluster size distribution. Instead of a sharp tricritical point, a tricritical region is found to occur for 0.5 < g < 0.8 within which the values of the critical exponents change continuously till the crossover from continuous to discontinuous transition is completed., Comment: 8 pages, 21 figures

A dissipative stochastic sandpile model is constructed and studied on small world networks in one and two dimensions with different shortcut densities $\phi$, where $\phi=0$ represents regular lattice and $\phi=1$ represents random network. The effect of dimension, network topology and specific dissipation mode (bulk or boundary) on the the steady state critical properties of non-dissipative and dissipative avalanches along with all avalanches are analyzed. Though the distributions of all avalanches and non-dissipative avalanches display stochastic scaling at $\phi=0$ and mean-field scaling at $\phi=1$, the dissipative avalanches display non trivial critical properties at $\phi=0$ and $1$ in both one and two dimensions. In the small world regime ($2^{-12} \le \phi \le 0.1$), the size distributions of different types of avalanches are found to exhibit more than one power law scaling with different scaling exponents around a crossover toppling size $s_c$. Stochastic scaling is found to occur for $ss_c$. As different scaling forms are found to coexist in a single probability distribution, a coexistence scaling theory on small world network is developed and numerically verified., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review E

A two parameter percolation model with nucleation and growth of finite clusters is developed taking the initial seed concentration \rho and a growth parameter g as two tunable parameters. Percolation transition is determined by the final static configuration of spanning clusters. A finite size scaling theory for such transition is developed and numerically verified. The scaling functions are found to depend on both g and \rho. The singularities at the critical growth probability gc of a given \rho are described by appropriate critical exponents. The values of the critical exponents are found to be same as that of the original percolation at all values of \rho at the respective gc . The model then belongs to the same universality class of percolation for the whole range of \rho., Comment: 8 pages, 24 figures

Discontinuous transition is observed in the equilibrium cluster properties of a percolation model with suppressed cluster growth as the growth parameter g0 is tuned to the critical threshold at sufficiently low initial seed concentration rho in contrast to the previously reported results on non- equilibrium growth models. In the present model, the growth process follows all the criteria of the original percolation model except continuously updated occupation probability of the lattice sites that suppresses the growth of a cluster according to its size. As rho varied from higher values to smaller values, a line of continuous transition points encounters a coexistence region of spanning and non- spanning large clusters. At sufficiently small values of rho (less equal 0.05), the growth parameter g0 exceeds the usual percolation threshold and generates compact spanning clusters leading to discontinuous transitions.