Abstract

Semiconductor microcavities have been extensively studied under current injection or nonresonant optical excitation to increase the spontaneous emission coupling efficiency p for realizing high performance semiconductor light sources.¹ On the other hand, we recently observed exciton-polariton emission, i.e. cavity enhanced coherent emission by resonant optical excitation of excitons in a GaAs single-quantum-well (SQW) microcavity, where the spectral linewidth and polarization of the pump wave were preserved in the coherent emission and there was no threshold behavior in the output versus pump power relation.² Quenching of such coherent emission by exciton-phonon and exciton-carrier scattering was also confirmed experimentally.

© 1995 IEEE