The Giant Dipole Resonance as a quantitative constraint on the symmetry energy

Understand

The possible constraints on the poorly determined symmetry part of the effective nuclear Hamiltonians or effective energy functionals, i.e., the so-called symmetry energy S(rho), are very much under debate.

• In the present work, we show that the value of the symmetry energy associated with Skyrme functionals, at densities rho around 0.1 fm^{-3}, is strongly correlated with the value of the centroid of the Giant Dipole Resonance (GDR) in spherical nuclei.
• Consequently, the experimental value of the GDR in, e.g., 208Pb can be used as a constraint on the symmetry energy, leading to 23.3 MeV < S(rho=0.1 fm^{-3}) < 24.9 MeV.