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

The lifetimes of excited states belonging to the lowest lying positive-parity bands in Cd-106,Cd-108 have been measured using the Doppler-shift attenuation method. The resulting B(E2) transition rates show a significant decrease with increasing spin in Cd-106, whereas in Cd-108 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 g(9/2) proton holes to aligned pairs of h(11/2) and g(7/2) neutron particles.