Investigation of cavity modes and direct observation of Purcell enhancement in 2D photonic crystal defect microcavities

We demonstrate our ability to control and manipulate the optical modes in 2D Photonic Crystal Defect cavities and investigate their coupling to InGaAs self-assembled quantum dots. Our results enable us to probe the nature of individual cavity modes and directly investigate cavity QED phenomena. For the lowest mode volume cavities investigated, consisting of a single missing air hole within a hexagonal lattice, we have measured a clear Purcell enhancement of the light-matter interaction in the weak coupling regime. For QDs on-resonance with localized cavity modes this translates to a shortening of the quantum dot spontaneous emission lifetime by a factor ∼2 when compared to off-resonance dots.