Over 30-fold enhancement of light extraction from free-standing photonic crystal slabs with InGaAs quantum dots at low temperature

Highly efficient extraction of photoluminescence is observed from two-dimensional photonic crystal slabs employing InGaAs quantum dots as active material. The introduction of quantum dots reduces diffusion of carriers and thereby suppresses the surface recombination at the air-hole sidewalls of the photonic crystal. Around the normalized frequency of 0.7, over thirty-fold enhancement of the photoluminescence extraction is achieved at 78 K, indicating strong coupling to leaky modes of the free-standing photonic crystal slab. In addition, when the photoluminescence spectra overlaps with a photonic band gap, enhanced light extraction originating from the photonic band gap is observed experimentally. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.