Nuclear structure, random interactions and mesoscopic physics

Standard concepts of nuclear physics explaining the systematics of ground state spins in nuclei by the presence of specific coherent terms in the nucleon-nucleon interaction were put in doubt by the observation that these systematics can be reproduced with high probability by randomly chosen rotationally invariant interactions. We review the recent development in this area, along with new original results of the authors. The self-organizing role of geometry in a finite mesoscopic system explains the main observed features in terms of the created mean field and correlations that are considered in analogy to the random phase approximation. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.