Nonequilibrium population of magnetic substates and excitation-energy division in the decay of an orbiting complex

γ-ray angular correlations have been measured for the strongly damped reaction /sup 12/C(/sup 28/Si,/sup 12/C)/sup 28/ Si at theta/sub c.m./ = 1800 for E/sub c.m./ = 42.7 and 33.7 MeV. The /sup 12/C (4.44 MeV, J/sup π/ = 2+) state is found to be produced almost exclusively in the m = 0 magnetic substate with respect to the beam axis. Comparison of singles and coincidence yields shows that the /sup 12/C comes out in its ground state most of the time (≅70%) resulting in the entire excitation energy ≅(15--20) MeV appearing in /sup 28/Si. These results can be reproduced by a constrained phase-space calculation