Dipole response of $^76$Se above 4 MeV

The dipole response of 76 34 Se in the energy range from 4 to 9 MeV has been analyzed using a (γ ⃗ ,γ ′ ) polarized photon scattering technique, performed at the High Intensity γ -Ray Source facility at Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, to complement previous work performed using unpolarized photons. The results of this work offer both an enhanced sensitivity scan of the dipole response and an unambiguous determination of the parities of the observed J=1 states. The dipole response is found to be dominated by E1 excitations, and can reasonably be attributed to a pygmy dipole resonance. Evidence is presented to suggest that a significant amount of directly unobserved excitation strength is present in the region, due to unobserved branching transitions in the decays of resonantly excited states. The dipole response of the region is underestimated when considering only ground state decay branches. We investigate the electric dipole response theoretically, performing calculations in a three-dimensional (3D) Cartesian-basis time-dependent Skyrme-Hartree-Fock framework.