In 1957, Landauer revolutionized the approach to the treatment of tran
sport in condensed matter systems through the concept that the conduct
ance could be directly related to the transmission coefficient through
the system. Recently, this idea has become all pervasive in the study
of mesoscopic systems, Here, we discuss the transport of ballistic ca
rriers through strongly confined (but open) systems, known as quantum
dots. The idea of transmission allows the connection of both classical
and quantum concepts, and this opens the door to extend these studies
to that of the quantum-to-classical transition. (C) 1998 Academic Pre
ss Limited.