Self-consistent calculations of the electric giant dipole resonances in light and heavy nuclei.

While bulk properties of stable nuclei are successfully reproduced by mean-field theories employing effective interactions, the dependence of the centroid energy of the electric giant dipole resonance on the nucleon number A is not. This problem is cured by considering many-particle correlations beyond mean-field theory, which we do within the quasiparticle time blocking approximation. The electric giant dipole resonances in 16O, 40Ca, and 208Pb are calculated using two new Skyrme interactions.