Abstract

Wannier excitons in a GaAs quantum well planar microcavity strongly couple with a single-mode photon field and form "microcavity exciton-polaritons". This quasi-particle has a bosomic character when the inter-particle scattering is negligible. Compared to GaAs bare excitons, exciton-polaritons have much lighter mass (by four orders of magnitude) and thus the thermal de Broglie wavelength of GaAs exciton-polaritons is 100 times longer than that of GaAs bare excitons at the same temperature. Therefore, the quantum statistical effect should emerge at a relatively low density.

© 1996 Optical Society of America