Spontaneous Emission Enhancement in Pillar-Type Microcavities

A reduction in photoluminescence decay time of pillar-type microcavities was observed with decreasing the detuning between the resonance wavelength of the cavities and the luminescence peak wavelength of the active layers. The radiative recombination time was extracted from the measured photoluminescence decay time by a diffusion equation analysis. The obtained spontaneous emission enhancement factor was between 1.6 and 1.8. This is the first observation of a spontaneous emission enhancement in three-dimensionally confined semiconductor microcavities.