Using lateral confining gates, it is possible to trap electrons in a system of two nearby potential minima in a two-dimensional electron gas. It is also possible to study such devices in an external magnetic field. The complexity of these systems is due to the fact that the length scales one can think of -- the confinement length, the distance between the dots, the magnetic length, and the Bohr radius of the interaction -- are all comparable, or they can be tuned to comparable values. It is our goal to study the emerging electronic structure in such settings: energies, densities, spin, correlation functions.

First, in a BSc thesis, an unrestricted Hartree-Fock calculation is performed to explore the ground state properties of the system. Eventually, a phase-fixed path-integral Monte Carlo study is envisaged, similar to the one that has been tested for single quantum dots. This may be the subject of a MSc or PhD project.