Abstract
Motivated by arguments of the nuclear core-layer model formulated in [S.I. Bastrukov, J.A. Maruhn, Z. Phys. A 335 (1990) 139], the macroscopic excitation mechanism of the electric pygmy dipole resonance (PDR) is considered as owing its origin to perturbation-induced effective decomposition of a nucleus into two spherical domains-undisturbed inner region treated as a static core and dynamical layer undergoing elastic shear vibrations. The elastic restoring force is central to the excitation mechanism under consideration and has the same physical meaning as in macroscopic model of nuclear giant resonances involving distortions of the Fermi-sphere providing unified description of isoscalar giant electric and magnetic resonances of multipole degree ℓ ≥ 2 in terms of two fundamental vibrational modes in an elastic sphere, to wit, as spheroidal (electric) and torsional (magnetic) modes of shear elastic oscillations of the nodeless field of material displacements excited in the entire nucleus volume. In the present Letter focus is placed on the emergence of dipole overtone in the frequency spectrum of spheroidal elastic vibrations as Goldstone soft mode. To emphasis this feature of dipole resonant excitation imprinted in the core-layer model we regain spectral equation for the frequency of spheroidal elastic vibrations trapped in the finite-depth layer, derived in the above paper, but using canonical equation of an elastic continuous medium. The obtained analytic equations for the frequency of dipole vibrational state in question and its excitation strength lead to the following estimates for the PDR energy centroid E PDR (E 1) = [31 ± 1] A - 1 / 3 MeV and the total excitation probability B PDR (E 1) = [1.85 ± 0.05] 10 -3 Z 2 A - 2 / 3 e 2 fm 2 throughout the nuclear chart exhibiting fundamental character of this soft dipole mode of nuclear resonant response. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.