Abstract

Micropillar cavities are versatile solid-state nanophotonic structures that locally enhance the light-matter interaction due to their high quality-factors and small mode volumes [1]. Moreover, they provide a clean free-space optical interface with nearly perfect in- and out-coupling efficiency. These qualities have stimulated the successful application of micropillar cavities with embedded quantum dot emitters as efficient single photon sources [2], and for observing cavity QED strong coupling [3]. In all these realizations, however, the cavity resonance is stationary in time, certainly during relevant interaction times such as an emitter lifetime. To give micropillar cavities new functionality, we propose to bring micropillars into a new dynamic regime where the cavity resonance is switched on a picosecond timescale [4] - faster than the emitter lifetime [5]. To this aim we have studied the ultrafast dynamics of all-optically switched micropillar cavities [6].

© 2015 IEEE