Light-exciton coupling effects in semiconductor microcavities and heterostructures

In this talk we discuss light-exciton coupling effects for semiconductor quantum wells inside and outside a microcavity geometry. A semiclassical theory for the absorption, transmission and reflection properties is presented and applied to analyze experiments in high quality systems. A recently developed, fully quantum mechanical theory for the emission properties of quantum-well excitons is discussed. The resulting semiconductor luminescence equations are solved to study i) the build-up of excitonic luminescence from a nonequilibrium electron-hole plasma and ii) the excitation dependent luminescence of a semiconductor microcavity. The results show that the appearance of excitonic signatures in the emission cannot simply be taken as an indication of exciton formation. Fermionic effects like excitation induced dephasing and the Pauli exclusion principle lead to characteristic nonlinearities in the emission spectra, which cause interesting nonlinear changes in the normal mode luminescence of microcavity systems.