Single-Particle Nondegeneracy and SU(3) Fermion Dynamical Symmetry

It is shown that the SU(3) symmetry of the fermion dynamical symmetry model is essentially preserved even for highly nondegenerate spherical single-particle energies. The breaking of SU(3) symmetry by single-particle energy terms for either normal deformation or superdeformation occurs only through an indirect Pauli effect and is significant only when the spherical single-particle splitting within shells is artificially large relative to that observed experimentally.