Circularly polarized vacuum field in three-dimensional chiral photonic crystals probed by quantum dot emission

Abstract: The quantum nature of light-matter interactions in a circularly polarized vacuum field was probed by spontaneous emission from quantum dots in three-dimensional chiral photonic crystals. Due to the circularly polarized eigenmodes along the helical axis in the GaAs-based mirror-asymmetric structures we studied, we observed highly circularly polarized emission from the quantum dots. Both spectroscopic and time-resolved measurements confirmed that the obtained circularly polarized light was influenced by a large difference in the photonic density of states between the orthogonal components of the circular polarization in the vacuum field.