Proton capture by 176Yb in the giant dipole resonance region

The proton capture cross section for the reaction ¹⁷⁶Yb(p, γ)¹⁷⁷Lu has been measured for incident proton energies between 6 and 24 MeV. The excitation function for this deformed nucleus agrees remarkably well with the results of previous studies on spherical nuclei, e.g. ¹⁴²Ce(p, γ)¹⁴³Pr. The results indicate that the giant dipole resonance (GDR) is strongly excited as predicted by the direct-semidirect (DSD) model. It is found that the model describes reasonably well the excitation function. In the low-energy proton range, where the excitation function increases rapidly with proton energy, the observed cross section is significantly higher than the DSD predictions. The difference can only partly be explained by compound nucleus contributions. In the high-energy end, the predicted cross section tends to be too high primarily due to an increasing contribution of direct capture to orbitals with large angular momenta.