Few-body quantum and many-body classical hyperspherical approaches to reactions and to cluster dynamics

The hyperspherical method is a widely used and successful approach for the quantum treatment of elementary chemical processes. It has been mostly applied to three-atomic systems, and current progress is here outlined concerning the basic theoretical framework for the extension to four-body bound state and reactive scattering problems. Although most applications only exploit the advantages of the hyperspherical coordinate systems for the formulation of the few-body problem, the full power of the technique implies representations explicitly involving quantum hyperangular momentum operators as dynamical quantities and hyperspherical harmonics as basis functions. In terms of discrete analogues of these harmonics one has a universal representation for the kinetic energy and a diagonal representation for the potential (hyperquantization algorithm). Very recently, advances have been made on the use of the approach in classical dynamics, provided that a hyperspherical formulation is given based on "classical" definitions of the hyperangular momenta and related quantities. The aim of the present paper is to offer a retrospective and prospective view of the hyperspherical methods both in quantum and classical dynamics. Specifically, regarding the general quantum hyperspherical approaches for three- and four-body systems, we first focus on the basis set issue, and then we present developments on the classical formulation that has led to applications involving the implementations of hyperspherical techniques for classical molecular dynamics simulations of simple nanoaggregates.