Characterization of shell filling of interacting polarons in a quantum dot through their optical absorption

The method for calculating the ground-state energy and the optical conductivity spectra is developed for a system of a finite number of interacting arbitrary-coupling polarons in a spherical quantum dot with a parabolic confinement potential. The path-integral formalism for identical particles is used in order to take into account the fermion statistics. Using a generalization of the Jensen-Feynman variational principle, the ground-state energy of a confined N-polaron system is analyzed as a function of N and of the electron-phonon coupling strength. The calculated optical conductivity spectra of the N-polaron system in a quantum dot manifest features related to ground-state transitions between states with different total spin.