Abstract

The control of spontaneous emission in room temperature semiconductors is expected to lead to innovative applications in optoelectronics, such as highly efficient light emitting diodes, thresholdless lasers, or sources of controlled trains of single photons for quantum cryptography. Several experiments have been reported to date on the enhancement of the spontaneous emission dynamics of semiconductor excitons, either due to the "strong" excitonphoton coupling in planar microcavities containing quantum wells, or due to the Purcell effect in micro-pillar cavities containing quantum boxes. To date, however, this enhancement has been achieved only at low temperatures and was fast destroyed by the interactions with thermal phonons when the temperature was raised.

© 2000 IEEE