Eur. Phys. J. A (2022) 58: 50
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-022-00704-y

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Candidate revolving chiral doublet bands in Cs

¹ Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS/IN2P3, IJCLab, 91405, Orsay, France
² Key Laboratory of High Precision Nuclear Spectroscopy and Center for Nuclear Matter Science, Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 730000, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of China
³ Mathematics and Physics Department, North China Electric Power University, 102206, Beijing, China
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland
⁵ Oliver Lodge Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Liverpool, L69 7ZE, Liverpool, UK
⁶ KTH Department of Physics, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden
⁷ School of Nuclear Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Science, 100049, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
⁸ Institute for Nuclear Research (Atomki-ELKH), 4001, Debrecen, Hungary
⁹ Department of Chemistry, Simon Fraser University, V5A 1S6, Burnaby, BC, Canada

^b costel.petrache@ijclab.in2p3.fr

Received: 17 August 2021
Accepted: 12 March 2022
Published online: 20 March 2022

Abstract

Two rotational bands are identified in Cs, one of which having very similar pattern to that of the strongly-coupled band. The properties of the bands with similar patterns extracted from the experimental data are in agreement with a chiral interpretation. Tilted axis cranking covariant density functional theory with pairing correlations and particle-number conserving cranked shell model calculations are employed to determine the deformation and to investigate the band configurations, respectively. It results that the backbending is induced by the rotational alignment of two protons, whose angular momenta reorient from the short to the intermediate axis, in a plane orthogonal to the angular momentum of the strongly-coupled proton which keeps aligned along the long axis. The total spin points in 3D, inducing the breaking of the chiral symmetry. This is the first observation of candidate chiral bands built on a configuration with three protons, one in the strongly coupled orbital which does not change orientation with increasing rotational frequency, and two in the orbital which reorients to the rotation axis. The bands are observed in the transient backbending regime, showing that the chirality in nuclei is a general phenomenon, being robust and present not only in nuclei with nearly maximal triaxiality and pure configurations, but also in nuclei with moderate triaxiality and mixed configurations which gradually evolve from one to three-quasiparticle configurations, like in the backbending region.