  We investigate the edge reconstruction phenomenon believed to occur in
quantum dots in the quantum Hall regime when the filling fraction is nu < 1.
Our approach involves the examination of large dots (< 40 electrons) using a
partial diagonalization technique in which the occupancies of the deep interior
orbitals are frozen. To interpret the results of this calculation, we evaluate
the overlap between the diagonalized ground state and a set of trial
wavefunctions which we call projected necklace (PN) states. A PN state is
simply the angular momentum projection of a maximum density droplet surrounded
by a ring of localized electrons. Our calculations reveal that PN states have
up to 99% overlap with the diagonalized ground states, and are lower in energy
than the states identified in Chamon and Wen's study of the edge
reconstruction.
