Semiconductor Cavity QED

College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, USA

11:00 am Wednesday, 13 August 2008, AGSE207 ( AGSE Building ), Hawthorn.

Quantum dots continue to prove themselves as artificial atoms with characteristics that may soon make them the oscillators of choice for cavity QED experiments. Nonlinear light-matter interactions are enhanced by placing the nonlinear optical materials in the antinode of the intracavity field. Optical bistability and nonlinear optical switches utilize this fact. And so does vacuum Rabi splitting (VRS), first seen in semiconductors by Weisbuch et al. in a VCSEL-like planar microcavity containing several quantum wells. VRS splitting becomes even more interesting for quantum optics and information science when the cavity is made three-dimensional and shrunk to a mode volume of a cubic wavelength and the quantum wells are replaced by a single quantum dot. This changes the VRS from many-atom-like to single-atom-like, i.e. the regime of true strong coupling where the state of the quantum dot is entangled with the presence or absence of a photon in the cavity field. This quantum system shows the characteristic strong coupling anticrossing of the quantum-dot and cavity-mode energies, and it emits quantum (nonclassical) light, exhibiting antibunching and sub-poissonian photon statistics. It should eventually be used for quantum state transfer and for demonstrating higher rungs of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder.

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