Coupling of surface and volume dipole oscillations in C<SUB>60</SUB> molecules

We first give a short review of the "local-current approximation" (LCA), derived from a general variation principle, which serves as a semiclassical description of strongly collective excitations in finite fermion systems starting from their quantum-mechanical mean-field ground state. We illustrate it for the example of coupled translational and compressional dipole excitations in metal clusters. We then discuss collective electronic dipole excitations in C60 molecules (Buckminster fullerenes). We show that the coupling of the pure translational mode ("surface plasmon") with compressional volume modes in the semiclasscial LCA yields semi-quantitative agreement with microscopic time-dependent density functional (TDLDA) calculations, while both theories yield qualitative agreement with the recent experimental observation of a "volume plasmon"