Evolution of collective structures in the heavy transitional nuclei above the N = 82 closed shell

The emergence of collectivity in atomic nuclei is a fundamental paradigm in nuclear structure physics. Considerable progress has been made towards the identification of excited states in heavy neutrondeficient nuclei above the N = 82 closed shell. This paper summarises recent progress in the spectroscopic study of the Ta, W and Re nuclides with N ∼ 90 obtained from recoil and recoil-decay tagging experiments. The nuclei near N = 90 occupy γ-soft transitional region where the nuclear shape is particularly sensitive to the interplay between collective excitations and the underlying single-particle structure. The consequences of these interactions for low and high-spin states are discussed