A lateral few electron dot

Recently vertical quantum dots containing just a few electrons have been fa bricated and studied. The long sought after "artificial atom" nature of the se dots was confirmed in these dramatic experiments. In this paper, however , we describe the fabrication of a lateral few electron quantum dot defined by electrostatic gates over a high mobility 2DEG. We present some of the s pectroscopic measurements we have performed on these dots and use them to c onfirm that the number of electrons in the dot lies between 10 and 20.