Compound-Nucleus Formation Following Direct Interactions to Highly-Excited Final States

When direct reactions populate highly excited, unbound configurations in the residual nucleus, the nucleus may further evolve into a compound nucleus. Alternatively, the residual system may decay by emitting particles into the continuum. Understanding the relative weights of these two processes as a function of the angular momentum and parity deposited in the nucleus is important for the surrogate-reaction technique. A particularly interesting case is compound-nucleus formation via the (d,p) reaction, which may be a useful tool for forming compound nuclei off the valley of stability in inverse-kinematics experiments. We present here a study of the compound formation probability for a closely-related direct reaction, direct-semidirect radiative neutron capture.