Correlation between electrons and vortices in quantum dots

Exact many-body wave functions for quantum dots containing up to four interacting electrons are computed and we investigated the distribution of the wave function nodes, also called vortices. For this purpose, we evaluate the reduced wave function by fixing the positions of all but one electron and determine the locations of its zeros. We find that the zeros are strongly correlated with respect to each other and with respect to the position of the electrons and formulate rules describing their distribution. No multiple zeros are found, i.e. vortices with vorticity larger than one. Our exact calculations are compared to results extracted from the recently proposed rotating electron molecule (REM) wave functions.