Investigation of antimagnetic rotation in light Cadmium nuclei: 106,108Cd

The lifetimes of excited states belonging to the lowest lying positive-parity bands in 106,108Cd have been measured using the Doppler-shift attenuation method. The resulting B(E2) transition rates show a significant decrease with increasing spin in 106Cd, whereas in 108Cd there is tentative evidence for a similar effect. The results are compared with cranking and semiclassical model calculations, which indicate that the structures have the properties expected from an 'antimagnetic' rotational band resulting from the coupling of g9/2 proton holes to aligned pairs of h11/2 and g7/2 neutron particles