Relativistic Coulomb excitation of the giant dipole resonance in nuclei: A straightforward approach

Abstract

We investigate alternatives to the standard formalism used for the study of relativistic Coulomb excitation of the giant dipole resonance in nuclei. The idea is to obtain reasonable results for the probabilities of excitation and cross sections to the one-phonon and two-phonon levels avoiding the substantial complexity of the treatments exploited so far. This is achieved for the relevant range of partial waves up to bombarding energies of at least 5 GeV per nucleon. The transfer of energy to the center of mass of the excited nuclei is also investigated.