Life time of soft multipole excitations

Decay of soft multipole excitations in halo nuclei is studied in comparison with the potential resonance state. Although the soft excitation has a sharp peak just above the particle threshold and carries extremely large transition strength, the decay rate looks much faster than that expected for a resonance state. Consequently, the half life is shown to be several orders of magnitude shorter than what one naively expects from the uncertainty principle. It is shown also that the soft excitations accumulate large transition strength as a non-resonant single-particle excitation, but not as particle-hole collective excitations like giant resonances.