A Study on Low Spin States in $^{154}$Gd Using $(p,p^{\prime})$ Reaction

Located at the stability line, the low lying spin states of the $^{154}$Gd nucleus were investigated at the University of Jyv\"{a}skyl\"{a} accelerator laboratory in Finland using the $^{154}$Gd$(p,p^{\prime}{\gamma})$ reaction. A proton beam of 12 MeV was used to excite the $^{154}$Gd target, with the gamma-rays from the reaction detected with the JUROGAM II array, while the LISA charged-particle spectrometer was used for detection of the inelastically scattered protons. This experiment marked one of the first uses of the LISA spectrometer at Jyv\"{a}skyl\"{a}, which enabled the efficient tagging of the proton-emitting reactions, thus helping to distinguish between the $(p,p^{\prime})$ and the much more copious $(p,xn)$ channels. By analysing the peaks obtained from the gamma-gamma, and gamma-gamma-proton coincidence matrices, a decay scheme has been built using the RadWare software Escl8r. Experimental methods, new transitions, and future steps will be discussed.