Abstract
An efficient variational many-body wave function for electrons in a quantum dot is introduced. We show that the proposed bosonic two-body correlation factor is able to capture nearly exactly the missing correlations of the lowest-Landau-level many-body wave function. We compare the results with exact diagonalizations. The comparison shows that quantum Monte Carlo techniques combined with the proposed wave function are a powerful tool for studying quantum dots. As further evidence for this, we apply the scheme to a maximum density droplet state for up to 40 electrons.