A low energy photon spectrometer (LEPS), which is a composite planar HPGe, has been characterised experimentally. It has been shown that beyond 200 keV, effect of image charges deteriorates the efficiency of the detector in its addback mode. Data has
been corrected on eventby- event basis resulting in improvement of the performance.
Nuclei in the upper-$sd$ shell usually exhibit characteristics of spherical single particle excitations. In the recent years, employment of sophisticated techniques of gamma spectroscopy has led to observation of high spin states of several nuclei ne
ar A$simeq$ 40. In a few of them multiparticle, multihole rotational states coexist with states of single particle nature. We have studied a few nuclei in this mass region experimentally, using various campaigns of the Indian National Gamma Array setup. We have compared and combined our empirical observations with the large-scale shell model results to interpret the structure of these nuclei. Indication of population of states of large deformation has been found in our data. This gives us an opportunity to investigate the interplay of single particle and collective degrees of freedom in this mass region.
