The production and study of the doubly magic 100Sn nucleus and its closest
neighbors has been a major experimental challenge in the last decades. The
Beta-decays of the even-even N=Z nuclei 96Cd, 98In and 100Sn
have been studied at an experiment at the National Superconducting Cyclotron
Laboratory. These nuclei were produced by fragmentation of a 120Mev/u 112Sn
primary beam impinging on a Be target.
The fragments of interest were unambiguously identified and their Beta-decay
was measured with the NSCL Beta Counting System (BCS) in conjunction with the
Segmented Germanium Array (SeGA).
The measured half-life for 100Sn is 0.55 (+0.70,-0.31) s, in agreement with a
previous measurement. We observed two Beta-decaying states in 98In with
half-lives of 47(13) ms and 0.66(40) s respectively. The half-live of 96Cd,
measured for the first time in our experiment, is 1.03 (+0.24,-0.21) s.
The implications of the measured half-life of 96Cd on the calculated rp-process
final abundances are discussed.