Dynamics of Coulomb dissociation in relativistic mean field theory

Abstract

Time-dependent relativistic mean field theory is used to describe the dynamics of Coulomb excitations of nuclei. As an example we consider the nucleus 16O. At small incident energies of the projectile we observe isovector dipole oscillations that correspond to the giant dipole resonance. With increasing excitation energy, the motion becomes increasingly anharmonic, and finally a full dissociation of 16O into proton and neutron clusters is observed.