Title: 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.