Photo-induced gyrotropic effects in semiconductor microcavities

Summary form only given. We assess the gyrotropic part of these photo-induced changes through a theoretical and experimental study of the polarization effects occurring at high exciton densities in a microcavity operated in the strong coupling regime. In this nonlinear process, a circularly-polarized pump pulse induces polarization changes on a linearly polarized incident probe beam due to the huge polarization dependent modifications of the light induced cavity-exciton coupling.