Microscopic calculations of double and triple giant resonance excitations in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We perform microscopic calculations of the inelastic cross sections for the double and triple excitation of giant resonances induced by heavy-ion probes within a semiclassical coupled-channels formalism. The channels are defined as eigenstates of a bosonic quartic Hamiltonian constructed in terms of collective random-phase approximation phonons. Therefore, they are superpositions of several multiphonon states, also with different numbers of phonons, and the spectrum is anharmonic. The inclusion of (n+1) phonon configurations affects the states whose main component is a n-phonon one and leads to an appreacible lowering of their energies. We check the effects of such further anharmonicities on the previously published results for the cross section for the double excitation of giant resonances (GR). We find that the only effect is a shift of the peaks toward lower energies, the double GR cross section being unmodified by the explicity inclusion of the three-phonon channels in the dynamical calculations. The latter provide an important contribution to the cross section in the triple GR energy region, which, however, is still smaller than the experimental available data. The inclusion of four-phonon configurations in the structure calculations does not modify the results.