Heavy ion excitation of giant resonances — The next generation

Abstract

The prospects for high energy heavy ion excitation of giant resonances are discussed. A brief review is provided of the results obtained to date using low/medium energy heavy ions and it is suggested that those results show no substantial advantage of heavy ions for giant resonance excitation. Calculations are presented that show that Coulomb excitation becomes the dominant excitation mechanism of the giant resonances for heavy ions above about 100 MeV/nucleon. The Coulomb excitation provides extremely large differential cross sections for excitation of both isovector and isoscalar resonances. Recent data are presented for inelastic scattering of 84 MeV/nucleon 17 O ions on 208 Pb that demonstrate the effectiveness of Coulomb excitation in providing extremely large cross sections and peak-to-continuum ratios for the isoscalar giant quadrupole resonance and the isovector giant dipole resonance.