ABSTRACT

This chapter presents some applications of the methods developed earlier to many-body systems in three different domains of physics, namely atomic nuclei, metal clusters, and semiconductor quantum dots. It focuses on the manifestation of periodic orbits through shell effects and provides an example of Strutinsky's shell-correction method. No completeness in the presentation of the selected topics has been attempted. What the chapter wants to convey with these examples is the beauty of some physical phenomena and of their simple description by semiclassical methods. Atomic nuclei exhibit all the complexities of a finite many-fermion system. A nucleus is composed of two kinds of nucleons, the protons and neutrons, each of them consisting of three quarks which are the constituents of all strongly interacting particles. Powerful techniques of reducing the many-body problem to that of a system of non-interacting particles in an average potential have been developed, and constitute the essence of the so-called mean-field theories.