Effect of large neutron excess on the dipole response in the region of the giant dipole resonance

The evolution of the dipole response in nuclei with strong neutron excess is studied in the Hartree-Fock plus random phase approximation with Skyrme forces. We find that the neutron excess increases the fragmentation of the isovector giant dipole resonance, while pushing the centroid of the distribution to lower energies beyond the mass dependence predicted by the collective models, The radial separation of proton and neutron densities associated with a large neutron excess leads to non-vanishing isoscalar transition densities to the GDR states, which are therefore predicted to be excited also by isoscalar nuclear probes. The evolution of the isoscalar compression dipole mode as a function of the neutron excess is finally studied. We find that the large neutron excess leads to a strong concentration of the strength associated with the isoscalar dipole operator Sigma(i)r(i)(3)Y(10), that mainly originates from uncorrelated excitations of the neutrons of the skin. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.