Continuing influence of shell effects at high-excitation energies

Abstract Empirical drops in ground-state nuclear polarizabilities indicate deviations from the effect of giant dipole resonances and may reveal the presence of shell effects in semi-magic nuclei with neutron magic numbers N = 50 , 82 and 126. Similar drops of polarizability in the quasi-continuum of nuclei with, or close to, magic numbers N = 28 , 50 and 82, could reflect the continuing influence of shell closures up to the nucleon separation energy. These findings open a new avenue to investigating magic numbers at high-excitation energies and strongly support recent large-scale shell-model calculations in the quasi-continuum region, which describe the origin of the low-energy enhancement of the photon strength function as induced paramagnetism. The nuclear-structure dependence of the photon-strength function asserts the generalized Brink-Axel hypothesis as more universal than originally expected.