Abstract

The alteration of the spontaneous emission (SE) in a microcavity can be viewed as a manifestation of the self-interference of a photon quantized field.¹ The self-interference is affected not only by the optical dephasing due to cavity-mirror loss but also by the optical dephasing due to the interaction of a photon field with the medium polarizations damped by reservoirs including phonon scattering as well as electron-electron scattering in absorbing media. Hereafter, we simply refer to the latter as "reservoir dephasing loss". Note that the reservoir dephasing loss is not associated with reabsorption loss caused by the reabsorption of a real photon emitted by an excited electron.³ In a high-Q semiconductor microcavity, especially at a room temperature, the reservoir dephasing loss significantly exceeds the mirror dephasing loss. However, the effect of the reservoir dephasing loss has not been taken into account so far in microcavity analyses. The purpose of this paper is to calculate the effect of the reservoir dephasing loss on the SE in a semiconductor microcavity using a photon Green's function technique.

© 1995 IEEE