Coupling of giant resonances to soft E1 and E2 modes in ^8B [rapid communication]

The dynamic coupling between giant resonance states and "soft" low-energy excitation modes in weakly-bound nuclei is investigated. A coupled-channels calculation is reported for the reaction ⁸B+Pb→p+⁷Be+Pb at 83 MeV/nucleon. It is shown that the low-energy response is only marginally modified by transitions to the isovector giant dipole and isoscalar giant quadrupole resonances.