  Andreev billiards are finite, arbitrarily-shaped, normal-state regions,
surrounded by superconductor. At energies below the superconducting gap,
single-quasiparticle excitations are confined to the normal region and its
vicinity, the essential mechanism for this confinement being Andreev
reflection. This Paper develops and implements a theoretical framework for the
investigation of the short-wave quantal properties of these
single-quasiparticle excitations. The focus is primarily on the relationship
between the quasiparticle energy eigenvalue spectrum and the geometrical shape
of the normal-state region, i.e., the question of spectral geometry in the
novel setting of excitations confined by a superconducting pair-potential.
Among the central results of this investigation are two semiclassical trace
formulas for the density of states. The first, a lower-resolution formula,
corresponds to the well-known quasiclassical approximation, conventionally
invoked in settings involving superconductivity. The second, a
higher-resolution formula, allows the density of states to be expressed in
terms of: (i) An explicit formula for the level density, valid in the
short-wave limit, for billiards of arbitrary shape and dimensionality. This
level density depends on the billiard shape only through the set of
stationary-length chords of the billiard and the curvature of the boundary at
the endpoints of these chords; and (ii) Higher-resolution corrections to the
level density, expressed as a sum over periodic orbits that creep around the
billiard boundary. Owing to the fact that these creeping orbits are much longer
than the stationary chords, one can, inter alia, hear the stationary chords of
Andreev billiards.
