Shape dependence of single particle response and the one body limit of damping of multipole vibrations of a cavity

We present a modification of the wall formula for one body dissipation in order to include the effect of irregularity in the shape of the one body potential on the dissipation mechanism. We arrive at a dissipation rate which is a scaled version of the wall formula developed earlier by Blocki et al. We show that the scaling factor is determined by a measure of chaos in the single particle motion. As an illustration, we obtain this measure of chaos for particles in a multipole deformed cavity with a view to use the scaled wall formula to calculate the damping widths of multipole vibrations of the cavity wall. Considering the amplitudes of the vibrations typical of the giant resonances in nuclei, it is observed that the effect of the shape dependence is to strongly suppress the damping caused by the original wall formula. © 1996 The American Physical Society.