Nonclassical light from an incoherently pumped quantum dot in a microcavity

Semiconductor microcavities with artificial single-photon emitters have become one of the backbones of semiconductor quantum optics. In many cases, however, technical and physical issues limit the study of optical fields to incoherently excited systems. We analyze the model of an incoherently driven two-level system in a single-mode cavity. The specific structure of the applied master equation yields a recurrence relation for the steady-state values of correlations of the intracavity field and the emitter. We provide boundary conditions that permit a systematic solution which is numerically less demanding than standard methods. The method allows us to directly infer reasonable cutoff conditions from the system parameters. Different cavity systems from previous experiments are analyzed in terms of field correlation functions which can be measured via homodyne correlation measurements. We find that nonclassical correlations occur in systems of moderate quantum-dot-cavity coupling rather than strong coupling. Our boundary conditions also allow us to derive analytical results for the overall quantum state and its higher-order moments. We obtain very good approximations for the full quantum state of the field in terms of the characteristic functions. It turns out that for every physically reasonable set of system parameters, the state of the intracavity field is nonclassical.