NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF SHELL-FILLING EFFECTS IN CIRCULAR QUANTUM DOTS

We have computed the capacitive energy associated with the addition of each electron to a circular quantum dot, reproducing the shell-fillin g behavior as reported in previous simulations and recently found expe rimentally. We derived quantitative estimates for the shape of the con fining potential and for the dot radius in the experiments. Our result s show that the succession of shell-filling events differs for the cas e of a realistic self-consistent potential from that predicted by a si ngle-electron approximation and-with an idealized parabolic potential.