Experimental evidence of chaos in the bound states of Pb-208

Abstract

Theoretical calculations, especially shell-model calculations, have shown a strongly chaotic behavior of bound states at higher excitation energy, in regions of high level density. However, it had not been possible up to now to observe chaos in the experimental bound energy levels of any single nucleus. In this paper we study the spectral fluctuations of the Pb-208 nucleus using the complete experimental spectrum of 151 states up to excitation energies of 6.20 MeV. For natural parity states the results are very close to the predictions of Random Matrix Theory (RMT) for the nearest-neighbor spacing distribution. By contrast, the results for unnatural parity states are far from RMT behavior. We interpret these results as a consequence of the strength of the residual interaction in Pb-208, which, according to experimental data, is much stronger for natural than for unnatural parity states. In addition our results show that chaotic and non-chaotic nuclear states coexist in the same energy region of the spectrum.