The thesis is divided in two parts, corresponding to the two main subjects on which I have worked during my PhD. In the first Part, we introduce many-body long-range interacting systems, such as plasma and self-gravitating systems. We first review the well known properties of isolated systems, which show peculiar behaviors both for what concern the equilibrium and the relaxation to equilibrium. We then consider long-range systems driven away from equilibrium and we show how the techniques developed for isolated systems can be extended to describe these situations. Generalizations to describe simplified models relevant for geophysical flows and two-dimensional turbulence are also discussed. Our work stands at the edge between the study of long-range interacting systems and the study of non-equilibrium systems.The second part of the thesis is devoted to the study of equilibrium properties of Hamiltonian systems with energy landscape techniques. A number of recent results is reviewed and applied to long and short-range interacting systems. One of the scope of my work was to study models whose energy landscape is much more complicated than what previously done. In the case of ferromagnetic short-range O(n) models on hypercubic lattices, our analysis unveiled a striking similarity between the critical energies of the Ising model and the O(n) models defined on the same lattice with the same interaction matrix. Generalizations of the Stillinger and Weber formalism are discussed as preliminary results and future perspectives.
