Influence of spin and interactions on quantum dots and nano-wires

In this dissertation we use sophisticated numerical methods in order to examine ground-state (GS) properties of two types of quantum systems with electron electron interactions: A quantum dot (QD) and a nano-wire. In the first half of the work we study a system of a single level coupled to a one-dimensional wire with interacting spinless electrons, when the wire is either clean or disordered. We utilize the density-matrix renormalization-group (DMRG) method to investigate the influence of the level on several thermodynamic properties of the clean interacting wire, which can be in one of two phases: Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid and charge density wave phases. When the wire is disordered, we investigate the Friedel oscillations, exploring the difference between the two phases and comparing them to the clean non-interacting case, for which we develop an exact formula for the oscillations. In the second half of the dissertation we study two cases of an isolated two-dimensional QD. We begin by an investigation of a new numerical method, the particle-hole DMRG (PH-DMRG), which is used to calculate the GS energy of a disordered QD consisting of interacting spinless electrons. We show that this method is much more accurate than the Hartree-Fock method, and we suggest an improvement of the algorithm, which reduces the error rate by almost 30 percents. Finally we study the magnetization of a QD with spin 1/2 electrons, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling and interactions. We calculate the g-factor and the expectation values of the spin operators in the GS, and find that when the QD is occupied by an even number of electrons, the GS can have a finite magnetization.