Critical behavior in the variation of GDR width at low temperature

We present the first experimental giant dipole resonance (GDR) width systematics, in the temperature region 0.8-1.2 MeV for 201Tl, a near Pb nucleus, to investigate the evolution of the GDR width in shell effect and pairing dominated region. The extracted GDR widths are well below the predictions of shell effect corrected thermal shape fluctuation model (TSFM) and thermal pairing included phonon damping model. A similar behavior of the GDR width is also observed for 63Cu measured in the present work and 119Sb, measured earlier. This discrepancy is attributed to the GDR induced quadrupole moment leading to a critical point in the increase of the GDR width with temperature. We incorporate this novel idea in the phenomenological description based on the TSFM for a better understanding of the GDR width systematics for the entire range of mass, spin and temperature.