%0 Journal Article
%A Creffield, Charles
%A Háusler, Wolfgang
%A Jefferson, John H
%A Sarkar, Sarben
%T Interacting electrons in polygonal quantum dots
%D 1999
%@ 1098-0121
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/59755
%X The low-lying eigenstates of a system of two electrons confined within a two-dimensional quantum dot with a hard polygonal boundary are obtained by means of exact diagonalization. The transition from a weakly correlated charge distribution for small dots to a strongly correlated ‘‘Wigner molecule’’ for large dots is studied, and the behavior at the crossover is determined. In sufficiently large dots, a recently proposed mapping to an effective charge-spin model is investigated, and is found to produce the correct ordering of the energy levels and to give a good first approximation to the size of the level spacings. We conclude that this approach is a valuable method to obtain the low-energy spectrum of few-electron quantum dots.
%~