The systematics of the giant dipole resonance (GDR) widths in hot and
rotating nuclei are studied in terms of temperature T, angular momentum J and
mass A. The different experimental data in the temperature range of 1 - 2 MeV
have been compared with the thermal shape fluctuation model (TSFM) in the
liquid drop formalism using a modified approach to estimate the average values
of T, J and A in the decay of the compound nucleus. The values of the ground
state GDR widths have been extracted from the TSFM parametrization in the
liquid drop limit for the corrected T, J and A for a given system and compared
with the corresponding available systematics of the experimentally measured
ground state GDR widths for a range of nuclei from A = 45 to 194. Amazingly,
the nature of the theoretically extracted ground state GDR widths matches
remarkably well, though 1.5 times smaller, with the experimentally measured
ground state GDR widths consistently over a wide range of nuclei.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for publication in Physical Review