  A comprehensive test of level density models for explaining the decay of
excited compound nuclei, 54 Mn, 56 Fe, 58 Co, 60 Ni, 61 Ni and 63 Cu, in the
energy range of 28 - 36 MeV has been performed. The compound nuclei of interest
in the desired ranges are populated using 6 Li based transfer reactions. The
proton decay spectrum for each excitation energy bins has been measured. The
measured proton spectrum has been reproduced using statistical model
calculations with different level density models. A variance minimised approach
has been employed for analysing the prediction capability of different level
density models. This approach has been converged to Gogny
Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov(HFB) microscopic level density model and which is
attributed as the most accurate model for the desired nuclei.
