This book offers a survey of nuclear physics at low energies and discusses similarities to mesoscopic systems. It addresses systems at finite excitations of the internal degrees of freedom where collective motion exhibits features typical of transport processes for small and isolated systems. The importance of quantum aspects is investigated both with respect to the microscopic damping mechanism and to the nature of the transport equations. It is vital to account for nuclear collective motion being self-sustained, which in the end implies a highly nonlinear coupling between internal and collec ... More

This book offers a survey of nuclear physics at low energies and discusses similarities to mesoscopic systems. It addresses systems at finite excitations of the internal degrees of freedom where collective motion exhibits features typical of transport processes for small and isolated systems. The importance of quantum aspects is investigated both with respect to the microscopic damping mechanism and to the nature of the transport equations. It is vital to account for nuclear collective motion being self-sustained, which in the end implies a highly nonlinear coupling between internal and collective degrees of freedom, a feature which in the literature all too often is ignored. The book is to be considered self-contained. The first part introduces basic elements of nuclear physics and guides to a modern understanding of collective motion as a transport process. This overview is supplemented in the second part with more advanced approaches to nuclear dynamics. The third part deals with special aspects of mesoscopic systems for which close analogies with nuclear physics are given. In the fourth part, the theoretical tools are discussed in greater detail. These include nuclear reaction theory, thermostatics and statistical mechanics, linear response theory, functional integrals, and various aspects of transport theory.