A new technique of elucidating β-decay schemes of isotopes with large density of states at low excitation energies has been developed, in which a Broad Energy Germanium (BEGe) detector is used in conjunction with coaxial hyperpure germanium detectors. The power of this technique has been demonstrated on the example of 183 Hg decay. Mass-separated samples of 183 Hg were produced by a deposition of the low-energy radioactive-ion beam delivered by the ISOLDE facility at CERN. The excellent energy resolution of the BEGe detector allowed γ rays energies to be determined with a precision of a few tens of electronvolts, which was sufficient for the analysis of the Rydberg-Ritz combinations in the level scheme. The timestamped structure of the data was used for unambiguous separation of γ rays arising from the decay of 183 Hg from those due to the daughter decays.
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