Abstract
Background: The electric dipole strength detected around the particle threshold and commonly associated with the pygmy dipole resonance offers unique information on neutron skin and symmetry energy, and is of astrophysical interest. The nature of such a resonance is still under debate.
Purpose: We intend to describe the giant and pygmy resonances in Pb-208 by enhancing their fragmentation with respect to the random-phase approximation. Method: We adopt the equation of motion phonon method to perform a fully self-consistent calculation in a space spanned by one-phonon and two-phonon basis states using an optimized chiral two-body potential.
A phenomenological density-dependent term, derived from a contact three-body force, is added to get single-particle spectra more realistic than the ones obtained by using the chiral potential only. The calculation takes into full account the Pauli principle and is free of spurious center-of-mass admixtures.
Results: We obtain a fair description of the giant resonance and obtain a dense low-lying spectrum in qualitative agreement with the experimental data. The transition densities as well as the phonon and particle-hole composition of the most strongly excited states support the pygmy nature of the low-lying resonance.
Finally, we obtain realistic values for the dipole polarizability and the neutron skin radius. Conclusions: The results emphasize the role of the two-phonon states in enhancing the fragmentation of the strength in the giant resonance region and at low energy, consistently with experiments.
For a more detailed agreement with the data, the calculation suggests the inclusion of the three-phonon states as well as a fine tuning of the single-particle spectrum to be obtained by a refinement of the nuclear potential.