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-filling behavior as reported in previous simulations and recently found experimentally. We derived quantitative estimates for the shape of the confining potential and for the dot radius in the experiments. Our results show that the succession of shell-filling events differs for the case of a realistic self-consistent potential from that predicted by a single-electron approximation and with an idealized parabolic potential.