Diffusion Monte Carlo study of circular quantum dots

TL;DR

This study uses Diffusion Monte Carlo methods to accurately compute energies and electron correlations in small circular quantum dots, comparing results with LSDA and Hartree-Fock theories to evaluate their accuracy.

Contribution

It provides detailed DMC calculations of energies and correlations in quantum dots, benchmarking against LSDA and Hartree-Fock methods for small electron numbers.

Findings

DMC yields precise ground and excited state energies

Electron-electron correlations are characterized in detail

Electrochemical potential changes are quantitatively analyzed

Abstract

We present ground and excited state energies obtained from Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations, using accurate multiconfiguration wave functions, for $N$ electrons ($N\le13$) confined to a circular quantum dot. We analyze the electron-electron pair correlation functions and compare the density and correlation energies to the predictions of local spin density approximation theory (LSDA). The DMC estimated change in electrochemical potential as function of the number of electrons in the dot is compared to that from LSDA and Hartree-Fock (HF) calculations.