Eur. Phys. J. A (2009) 42: 135-139
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2009-10887-1

Letter

Extreme -clustering in the ¹⁸O nucleus

¹ Department of Physics, Florida State University, 32306, Tallahassee, FL, USA
² Cyclotron Institute, Texas A&M University, 77843, College Station, TX, USA
³ The University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK

^* e-mail: edj04@fsu.edu

Received: 19 June 2009
Revised: 24 August 2009
Accepted: 18 September 2009
Published online: 22 October 2009

Abstract

The structure of the ¹⁸O nucleus at excitation energies above the decay threshold was studied using ¹⁴C + resonance elastic scattering. A number of states with large reduced widths have been observed, indicating that the -cluster degree of freedom plays an important role in this N Z nucleus. A 0⁺ state with an reduced width exceeding the single-particle limit was identified at an excitation energy of 9.9±0.3 MeV. We discuss evidence that states of this kind are common in light nuclei and give possible explanations of this feature.