Beta decay and strength distributions

With the increasing accessibility of nuclei far from stability, experimenters find themselves faced more and more often with complex β-decay schemes: nuclei with over 5 MeV of β-decay energy, exhibiting hundreds and perhaps thousands of transitions. A detailed level-by-level exposition of such schemes - for example, by studying β-delayed γ-rays - is at best prohibitively time consuming, and at worst actually impossible with current techniques. Furthermore, even if reliable schemes are obtained experimentally, their confrontation with theory is severely limited by the absence of theories sufficiently complete to account for such complex spectra. At best, it is the details of the first few excited states and the general features of the rest that are useful for comparison. From both points of view, experimental and theoretical, there is strong motivation to find a broader perspective, emphasizing these general features without being overwhelmed by a proliferation of detail