Study of the Beta decay strength of 28Ne*

The modern nuclear shell model, so called configuration interaction model, describes nuclear states using a basis of simple wavefunctions in an external potential and a residual interaction between nucleons. To solve the shell-model Hamiltonian, we use a modern diagonalization code called Kshell. With it we calculate the energies of excited states and nuclear transformations such as beta-decay. This allows us to compare them to experimental data and validate the accuracy of the nuclear interaction used. This is vital to improving the interactions needed to encompass the totality of the table of nuclides. Using Kshell and the SDPF-M interaction, we calculated the beta decay strength of Ne28 to Na28. The data was then filtered to isolate the excitation energy and beta decay energy of the transition from Ne28 to Na28. The experimental spectrographs of the gamma-ray events following the beta decay of Ne28 to Na28 were investigated, noting peaks in the spectrograph corresponding to the count of gamma-ray events of a particular energy. These peaks were compared to the gamma-ray events of Ne28 to Na28 published in "β-delayed γ spectroscopy of neutron rich 27,28,29Na" by Tripathi et al, 2006. Of the 16 reported gamma-ray events, 12 were observed in the experimental data investigated.