Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

In recent attempts to search for exotic shapes, hyperdeformation (HD), and Jacobi transitions in Hf, Ba, Xe, Sn and Nd nuclei, ridge structures presumably originating from nuclei of very elongated shapes have been observed in ¹²⁶Ba, with Gammasphere (GS) and in ¹²⁶Xe, with Euroball-IV (EB-IV). After the promising results from GS, a second experiment in ¹²⁶Ba followed at EB-IV, taking advantage of the use of the BGO Inner Ball (IB) for selecting the highest spins. The decay of the Giant Dipole Resonances (GDR) is also studied, and the analysis in progress. The Quasi-continuum transitions in the Jacobi region, show a significant decrease in energy for both ¹²⁶Ba and ¹²⁶Xe, compared to the Thomas-Fermi- and the LSD model predictions. Similar effects were recently found for other nuclei by Ward et al.