A theory of intermediate structure,overlapping resonances and photonuclear reactions in light nuclei

Starting from a many body Hamiltonian a general theory involving intermediate structures and overlapping resonances in nuclear reaction has been worked out. This treatment, based on Trefftz's work on dielectronic recombination in atomic physics, avoids explicit use of projection operators and all relevant quantities like decay widths and energy shifts are explicitly expressed in terms of two body matrix elements. In particular, attention has been focused on the interaction of bound states among themselves and then on the coupling of the continuum with these interacting bound states. For the case of overlapping resonances, it is shown that in general one cannot take a simple energy average of the resonant amplitudes, and explicit equations for this case have been obtained. This microscopic theory also provides a justification of the model of Duke, Malik, and Firk in explaining the intermediate structure in giant dipole resonance region of ¹⁶O and ²⁸Si. However, the formalism is a general one and is suitable for the study of intermediate structure involving isolated and overlapping resonances for many types of reactions.