Relaxation of giant resonances: Semimicroscopic description (Methods, Results, and Prospects)

Abstract

An account of a semimicroscopic approach to globally describing dominant relaxation modes for giant resonances in spherical nuclei is given. This approach is based on the continuum version of the random-phase approximation and on a phenomenological description of the fragmentation effect. The fragmentation effect in question is taken into account in the “pole” approximation in terms of the excitationenergy-dependent imaginary part of the single-particle effective optical potential directly in the equations of the approximation in question. In the practical implementation of the above approach, use is made of the Landau-Migdal interaction in the particle-hole channel and a phenomenological mean field of the nucleus being considered, these two being related by a partial-consistency condition. The results obtained within this approach by calculating integrated and differential features for a number of giant resonances over a broad range of excitation energies are used to perform a comparison with available experimental data and to predict the results of possible experiments. A particle-hole optical model that serves both as a substantiation for the existing version of the semimicroscopic approach and as a basic element for describing excitations of the particle-hole type at an arbitrary (albeit rather high) energy is formulated.