During the last decade, the optical response of semiconductor nanostructures has been the subject of intense experimental and theoretical investigations in the context of nano-optics. Consequently, many basic features are well understood by now, and some properties are even exploited in commercial devices such as light-emitting diodes, semiconductor nanostructure lasers and optical switches. The operation of such systems is based on the interaction of radiation field with carriers in a quasi-two-dimensional confined semiconductor, the so-called quantum well, embedded inside a microcavity. In fact, the quantum confinement of the translational motion of carriers inside such many-particle system together with their strong coupling with quantized cavity-field result in some interesting optical properties. These properties can allow the realization of a new generation of efficient solid-state emitters of single-photon pulses and nonclassical light. Such light sources have recently attracted much interest for pos¬sible applications in secure communica¬tion systems.

In this lecture, we present a comprehensive overview of the fundamental aspects of theoretical studies on semiconductor microcavity optical phenomena. The analysis in this lecture contains two main parts concentrating on semiclassical semiconductor optics and a full quantum optical theory. In the first part, after introducing some important research topics in nano-photonics, we briefly review the semiclassical approach to the description of quantum well-light interaction in a microcavity. In this way, we particularly concentrate our attention on the theoretical methods for analyzing the optical response of a quantum well in the presence of both dissipation effects and carrier correlations in the framework of many-particle physics. In the second part, by introducing a full quantum model for quantum well-light interaction, we comprehensively treat some issues such as semiconductor microcavity luminescence, the effect of quantum correlations between photons and carriers on the properties of emitted light for both coherent and incoherent excitation regimes and some important quantum statistical features of photon-exciton interaction inside a quantum well.

Prerequisites : Advanced Quantum Mechanics and Electrodynamics