Number 230 (Story #1), June 14, 1995 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein HYPERDEFORMED NUCLEI even more distorted than superdeformed nuclei have been found in recent experiments at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. When two medium-sized nuclei collide off-center, they can fuse into a highly-spinning, distorted nucleus which then sheds its rotational energy by emitting a series of gamma rays. In the past few years, researchers have found numerous examples of superdeformed nuclei, football-shaped particles with a 2-to-1 long-to-short axis ratio. But in recent experiments at LBL's 88-Inch Cyclotron, even more oblong (3-to-1) nuclei have apparently been produced. Demetrios Sarantites (314-935-6504) of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues smashed a 230-MeV beam of vanadium-51 nuclei into a molybdenum-100 foil. Gamma rays and charged particles, detected by LBL's Gammasphere and Microball arrays respectively, suggested the existence of hyperdeformed gadolinium-147 nuclei. The existence of such nuclear states challenges the current understanding of fission and fusion in nuclei with very high angular momentum. One might expect such highly spinning nuclei to fragment immediately into two smaller pieces. Instead, a very small fraction of the hyperdeformed nuclei remain intact and merely get rid of their spins by emitting gamma rays. (D.R. LaFosse et al., to appear in Physical Review Letters, 26 June 1995.)