Correlated motion between many electrons is one of the most challenging problems in physics. Of particular interest is the effect of intense laser pulses on few-electron atoms and semiconductor nanostructures such as quantum dot and disks. Surprisingly the experimentally accessible regions for atoms and semiconductor nanostructures correspond to the same scales of distance, time, energy and intensity once the effective mass and the dielectric constant of the semiconductor are taken into account. Recent advances in techniques for computing ground-state configurations in atoms permit the time-dependent many-electron Schrodinger equation to be solved numerically for real systems using current computers. The scaling properties between atoms and nanostructures allow the same code to study both. Problems of interest include, for atoms, photoelectron spectra and resonant transitions, and, for nanostructures, formation and evolution of excitons in quantum dots and the correlated tunneling of electrons through a quantum disk.
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