A semiclassical description of rapidly rotating nuclei

A brief review is made of a recent semiclassical treatment of nuclear rotation where explicit and simple expressions for relevant densities and moments of inertia in terms of the matter densities of rotating nuclei, have been derived within the framework of the Extended Thomas-Fermi approximation upon using a Skyrme nucleon-nucleon effective interaction. As a result of preliminary non-fully self-consistent calculations, the moments of inertia are found not to deviate very much from the rigid body ansatz, since corrective terms arising from the orbital motion and the spin degrees of freedom are found to roughly cancel each other. We particularly develop here a proof of equivalence in our routhian approach, of kinematic and dynamic moments of inertia. As a testing case we have also extended the formalism to the translational case in the ''pushing model'' approach and found the right translational mass. (orig.)