THE FEEDING OF THE SUPERDEFORMED BAND IN GD-148

The feeding pattern of the superdeformed band in 148Gd has been found to remain essentially the same, using the Sn-122 (Si-30, Xn) Gd-152-x reaction, by varying the energy of the incident Si-30 between 150 and 166 MeV in steps of around 5 MeV, leading to different input angular momenta and excitation energies in the compound nuclear system. This similarity as well as the relative yields of the superdeformed states as a function of beam energy may be understood in terms of the nuclear level density dependence on deformation and the onset of fission. In addition, it has been shown that, at beam energies, the selection of high-energy gamma-rays does not enhance the yield of the superdeformed states.