At the nearly-monoenergetic, fully-polarized gamma beam at HIGS, the isotope ¹⁵⁰Nd was irradiated at energies up to the particle threshold (approx. 7 MeV). A new mode of the facility for high beam resolution was used. The surprising result: the decays do not follow the so-called Porter-Thomas distribution, but indicate structure in the chaos of the highly-excited nuclear states, which in turn may also have far-reaching implications for the description of astrophysical processes.

The work is accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The preprint is available on arXiv.org.