Microscopic theory of the γ decay of nuclear giant resonances

In the past decades, the gamma decay of giant resonances has been studied using phenomenological models. In keeping with possible future studies performed with exotic beams, microscopically based frameworks should be envisaged. In the present paper, we introduce a model which is entirely based on Skyrme effective interactions, and treats the ground-state decay within the fully self-consistent random phase approximation (RPA) and the decay to low-lying states at the lowest order beyond RPA. The model is applied to Pb-208 and Zr-90, and the results are compared with the experimental data.