Influence of Structural Disorder and Light Coupling on the Excitonic Response of Semiconductor Microcavities

The interplay between structural disorder, Coulomb interaction, and light-coupling effects is investigated for high-quality quantum wells in a semiconductor microcavity. The independently measured experimental susceptibility of a single quantum well in linear dispersion theory yields excellent agreement with a series of measured reflectivity spectra for a variety of microcavity and distributed Bragg structures, showing that the disorder-averaged response of the exciton in its quantum well determines the optical response.