Relativistic nuclear excitation—A new approach

Abstract Continued interest in learning about the giant collective dipole resonances in nuclei—both at the one- and two-phonon level—has brought about a gradual shift of the experimental bombarding energies into a higher range. As a consequence, the reactions of interest can no longer be investigated in terms of the traditional, classical formalisms but need be upgraded into the relativistic regime. This extension has been implemented correctly insofar as the Coulomb excitation mechanism is concerned. For nuclear excitation processes, on the other hand, the present stand is much less satisfactory. Very few calculations have been performed so far and these make use of boosting prescriptions of the nuclear fields that are not entirely justified. In this contribution we update the situation of this problem exploiting a recently developed approach that yields the nuclear couplings with much less uncertainty.