Study of extreme nuclear shapes in extreme conditions

Studies of extreme nuclear shapes have always fascinated scientists and are being pursued quite strongly over the years. Nuclei present themselves with interesting shapes and structures at different conditions of spin, excitation and also with the number of neutrons and/or protons in them. Gamma decays from the Giant dipole Resonances in nuclei can probe directly their shapes at different extreme conditions by looking at their resonant line-shapes, e.g., Jacobi shapes and shape-transitions, super/hyper-deformation etc. Similar such studies, done for the first time, using the LAMBDA high energy gamma spectrometer developed at VECC, is discussed here.