Information-theoretic measures of electron correlation in a double quantum dot

Abstract

In this work, we investigated how variations in spatial confinement affect the electron correlation between two electrons in a symmetric double quantum dot. In strong confinement regime, the ground-state energy can be obtained using the Hartree-Fock method neglecting the electron-electron repulsion term. Under a weaker confinement, the FCI method provides a more accurate description. Using the mutual information as a measure of correlation, we determine the confinement regions where electronic motion is uncorrelated. We conjecture that the Shannon entropy can serve as a qualitative guide to to study the electron correlation. We identified an approximately linear relationship between mutual information and relative correlation energy.