Abstract

Excitons in semiconductor microcavities are a contemporary subject that has produced a number of experimental demonstrations of the impact of enhanced coupling between extended electronic states in a crystalline solid and resonant electromagnetic waves [1],[2]. These demonstrations have been limited to GaAs-based semiconductor systems, in large part due to ready access to quality epitaxial material. Strong recent progress has, however, also occurred in wide-gap II-VI semiconductors, driven by the prospects of new compact blue-green diode lasers, and a wide range of heterostructure designs is now available to test also other ideas such as microcavity effects. One important difference between the GaAs-based and ZnSe-based quantum well systems is that a considerably larger oscillator strength can in principle be obtained in the latter case where the excitan binding energy can satisfy the condition E_x> hω_LO, kT (at room temperature). We demonstrate here the implications of such exciton strength in initial experiments in a II-VI microcavity.

© 1995 Optical Society of America