ABSTRACT
The electronic structure of quantum dots resembles that of atoms. This chapter compares effective mass approximation results obtained with local spin density approximation in self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dots against an exact treatment of the EMA many-body interactions obtained with diffusion quantum Monte Carlo. The density functional theory approach to obtaining the ground state energy is to replace the rather complex N-electron ground state wave function and the associated Schrodinger equation by the much simpler ground state electron density and the corresponding functional forms and of the kinetic and potential energy operators, respectively. The simplest Quantum Monte Carlo method is variational Monte Carlo, in which expectation values for a trial wave function are evaluated using a Metropolis algorithm.
