The quasicontinuum of gamma rays from the feeding and decay of the superdeformed in 194Pb

Over the last year we developed techniques for the study of the quasicontinuum of gamma-rays from both the feeding and especially the decay of the superdeformed (SD) bands in the Hg nuclei, most notably 192Hg. From this analysis we could extract both the spin and energy of some of the SD bands. The quasicontinuum analysis is the only technique so far that could extract these two fundamental properties of the now more than 100 SD bands found in the A = 150 and A = 190 regions. We based our understanding of the feeding and decay on comparisons of the data with extensive Monte Carlo simulations of the emission of gamma rays, both from the entry distribution toward the SD minimum, and, at lower spins, from the decay out of the SD band back to the states in the normal well