Nuclei are self bound systems of interacting nucleons, whose unified description is made intricate by the very diverse phenomenology emerging in nuclear systems. Besides individual excitations responsible for absolute binding energies and separation energies between nuclei, long range correlations with a high degree of collectivity play a major role in macroscopic properties of nuclei and are essential for comparison with experimental measurements. In this thesis, the focus is put on microscopic models where the nucleus is described as a collection of point-like nucleons in strong interactions, falling into the realm of the quantum many-body problem. Two approaches exist to solve this problem, differing by the very nature of the interaction...