  We investigate experimentally and theoretically the behavior of Coulomb
blockade (CB) peaks in a magnetic field that couples principally to the
ground-state spin (rather than the orbital moment) of a chaotic quantum dot. In
the first part, we discuss numerically observed features in the magnetic field
dependence of CB peak and spacings that unambiguously identify changes in spin
S of each ground state for successive numbers of electrons on the dot, N. We
next evaluate the probability that the ground state of the dot has a particular
spin S, as a function of the exchange strength, J, and external magnetic field,
B. In the second part, we describe recent experiments on gate-defined GaAs
quantum dots in which Coulomb peak motion and spacing are measured as a
function of in-plane magnetic field, allowing changes in spin between N and N+1
electron ground states to be inferred.
