Identification of Excited States in 61Ga: Mirror Nuclei in the Upper fp Shell

In the fusion-evaporation reaction Ca-40+Mg-24 at 104 MeV beam energy, excited states have been observed for the first time in the isotope Ga-31(61)30. The experimental setup comprised the Ge array CLARION, a recoil mass spectrometer and, in its focal plane, an ionization chamber. Five transitions in Ga-61 are identified, out of which a cascade of three transitions has been established by means of recoil-gammagamma coincidences. The strong transitions at 271 keV in Ga-61 and 124 keV in Zn-61 are viewed as the "mirror" 5/2(-)-->3/2(-) ground-state transitions. The rather large energy difference of 150 keV is suggested to arise from Coulomb monopole contributions. Shell-model calculations support this interpretation