Trajectory effects in coulomb excitation

Abstract

We compare the cross sections for Coulomb excitation of multiple giant dipole resonances in 208 Pb + 208 Pb scattering using Coulomb trajectories and straight-line trajectories that have the same point of closest approach as the Coulomb one. We find the effects of the Coulomb deflection relative to the straight line trajectory to be small at incident energies above about 500 MeV/nucleon.