Extended Thomas-Fermi description of rotating nuclei

We present a semiclassical description of rotating nuclei in the framework of the Extended Thomas-Fermi density functional theory up to orderℎ2. It lead to functional expression of quantities such as the kinetic energy, current and spin vector densities in terms of the local (spin-scalar) density ρ(r) alone. For effective nucleon-nucleon interaction of the Skyrme type a simple analytical expression is obtained for moments of inertia. It consist, at lower order, of Thomas-Fermi (TF) term which is shown to be identical to the rigid body moment of inertia and semiclassical corrections of order ℎ2 which is small. The importance of the Thouless-Valatin self consistency terms which are included in our approach, is pointed out. Within this approach we have performed self consistent semiclassical calculations in the restricted space of diffuse (Fermi type) densities and ellipsoidal triaxial shapes. Our analysis is qualitatively consistent with LDM results as in the paper by Cohen, Plasil and Swiatecki. However a significant dependence of the LDM parameters as function of angular momentum has been pointed out. Generalizing our method to finite temperature we recover functional expressions formally similar to the T=0 case with temperature dependent coefficients. The above formalism has also been extended to the semi-quantal description of other large amplitude collective models and of their couplings. In particular it has been applied to the dynamics of rigid rotation coupled with a simple (uniform) intrinsic vortical motion. (author). 20 refs