Coherent and incoherent dynamics of strong coupling microcavities

Summary form only given. When the Fabry-Perot mode of a planar microcavity is resonant with the semiconductor exciton transition of a quantum well embedded in that cavity, many interesting effects occur of which the so-called strong coupling regime has received the most interest. In this regime the photon-exciton interaction is no longer perturbative and at resonance, the degeneracy of the photon mode and the exciton transition is lifted leading to a splitting, described by different terms such as vacuum Rabi splitting, normal-mode coupling, and cavity polariton splitting. The cavity polaritons are strongly influenced by disorder and acoustic phonon scattering. In this paper we show how the dynamics of such a system can be probed by exciting the system resonantly. Photoluminescence under cw resonant excitation shows that the system may or may not be in thermal equilibrium with the lattice.