Abstract

Recent progress in vertical surface-emitting-laser-diode technology has raised considerable interest in cavity-QED effects in high-quality vertical semiconductor microcavities. When an excitonic transition and a single cavity mode are strongly coupled, the normal modes of the system are coupled modes split by the vacuum-Rabi frequency, corresponding in the time domain to an oscillation of the excitation between modes of exciton and photon character. Recently, the vacuum-Rabi splitting and preliminary observations of time-domain oscillation in semiconductor quantum microcavities have been reported.^1,2 In this paper we investigate rigorously the time-domain vacuum-Rabi oscillation by femtosecond upconversion and pump-probe techniques.

© 1994 Optical Society of America