Role of temperature in the physics of metallic clusters

The finite temperature of the ionic degrees of freedom plays either a determining or an important role in a large variety of cluster properties. We briefly review here the role played by the temperature in different cluster phenomena, such as: occurrence of phase transitions, shape fluctuations, detailed properties of the static and dynamic structure formfactors, of the electron single-particle spectra and of the optical response, and the emergence of the 1/f-noise in ionic dynamics. Presented at the International Conference on “Atomic Nuclei and Metallic Clusters”, Prague, September 1–5, 1997.