Splitting of the Pygmy Dipole Resonance

We report on experiments using the (α, α' γ) method to investigate the structure of the Pygmy Dipole Resonance (PDR) in the nuclei 94Mo, 124Sn, 138Ba and 140Ce. The experiments were performed with the Big-Bite Spectrometer (BBS) at the KVI at an incident energy of Eα = 136 MeV. The method allows a clean separation of the PDR from other excitations in the same energy region by selecting the ground-state γ-decay channel. In addition, the high resolution of the γ-ray spectroscopy using high-purity Germanium detectors allows a state-to-state analysis even in the case of the rather high level density of the investigated nuclei. The comparison to (γ,γ') experiments on the same nuclei reveals a splitting of the PDR into two groups of states with different underlying structure.