Classical model of a Wigner crystal in a quantum dot

Phase transitions in quantum dots

“…Questions concerning a high-field transition to socalled Wigner molecules and crystals, in which electrons occupy fixed sites in a rotating frame and are therefore localized, have been investigated by Maksym 2 and Bolton and Rössler. 5 Maksym considers a ''large angular momentum limit'' of systems of up to five electrons and describes only excited states of integer angular momentum. He speculates on the existence of ground-state Wigner molecules in the large-field limit.…”

“…After a brief description of the well-known phases of the rotationally symmetric case as they appear in the Hartree-Fock approximation, we present the gradual transition towards a Wigner molecule and crystal; the various spatial configurations are shown and the shell structure is compared to that of the classical calculation. 5 We further describe a variational Monte Carlo calculation that we performed to improve the wave function by a Jastrow ansatz. Finally, we investigate the rotational spectra associated with the breaking of the continuous rotational symmetry; the heat capacity associated with this new rotational degree of freedom is calculated.…”

Molecular States of Electrons: Emission of Single Molecules in Self-Organized InP/GaInP Quantum Dots

“…Experimentally such crystallization has been observed in two dimensional electron systems on the surface of liquid He (Grimes & Adams, 1979), in a GaAs/GaAlAs heterojunction (Andrei et al, 1988) and in Si (Pudalov et al, 1993) using detection of the metal-insulator transition. (Bolton & Rössler, 1993).…”

Molecular dynamics simulations of two-dimensional clusters of charges

“…These systems and their configurations have been observed experimentally [6], and are important in solid-state physics [10], plasma physics [7] as well as in atomic physics [8]. Bolton and Rössler [9] implemented Monte Carlo simulation of isotropic parabolic confinement, to investigate the minimum energies and spatial distributions for small numbers (1-40) of particles.…”