Justification of effective particle numbers for describing intruder bands

The standard theoretical explanation of low-lying, deformed, intruder bands in even-even nuclei near closed shells is in terms of two-particle, two-hole excitations across the major-shell gap. One normally ignores the difference between particles and holes and assumes that the effective proton (or neutron) number has increased by four. In this paper, the authors provide a justification of this approximation by comparing two F-spin multiplets having the same F value, where one multiplet is for the ground-band levels of a set of nuclei, while the second multiplet is for the intruder-band levels of another set of nuclei