Structure studies of conventional and novel excitations to the continuum in reactions with unstable nuclei

The themes covered in the present thesis are: a detailed study of double phonon giant resonances in normal nuclei, the enhancement of the excitation of Giant Pairing Vibrations using weakly-bound nuclei, an extension of the Steinwedel-Jensen model for Giant Dipole Resonances to treat surface effects and presence of neutron skin and, finally, a model on breakup reactions in weakly-bound dicluster nuclei.