The gamma decay of the giant dipole resonance: from zero to finite temperature

This paper is intended to give a selected and rather brief overview of the work made in the last thirty years to study the properties of the giant dipole resonance focusing in particular on nuclei formed at finite temperatures using heavy ion reactions. The physical problems that are discussed (using examples of particular results) in this paper can be grouped into 3 major topics: (i) the temperature dependence of the GDR width; (ii) the dipole oscillation in reaction dynamics; (iii) the isospin mixing at finite temperature. (invited comment)