Formation and control of electron molecules in artificial atoms: Impurity and magnetic-field effects

Interelectron interactions and correlations in quantum dots can lead to spontaneous symmetry breaking of the self-consistent mean field, resulting in the formation of Wigner molecules. With the use of spin-and-space unrestricted Hartree-Fock ~sS-UHF! calculations, such symmetry breaking is discussed for field-free conditions, as well as under the influence of an external magnetic field. Using as paradigms impurity-doped ~as well as the limiting case of clean! two-electron quantum dots ~which are analogs to heliumlike atoms!, it is shown that the interplay between the interelectron repulsion and the electronic zero-point kinetic energy leads, for a broad range of impurity parameters, to the formation of a singlet ground-state electron molecule, reminiscent of the molecular picture of doubly excited helium. A comparative analysis of the conditional probability distributions for the sS-UHF and exact solutions for the ground state of two interacting electrons in a clean parabolic quantum dot reveals that both of them describe the formation of an electron molecule with similar characteristics. The self-consistent field associated with the triplet excited state of the two-electron quantum dot ~clean as well as impurity doped! exhibits a symmetry breaking of Jahn-Teller type, similar to that underlying formation of nonspherical open-shell nuclei and metal clusters. Furthermore, impurity and/or magnetic-field effects can be used to achieve controlled manipulation of the formation and pinning of the discrete orientations of the Wigner molecules. Impurity effects are futher illustrated for the case of a quantum dot with more than two electrons.