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We study the polarization properties of light emitted by quantum dots that are embedded in chiral photonic crystal structures made of achiral planar GaAs waveguides. A modification of the electromagnetic mode structure due to the chiral grating fabricated by partial etching of the waveguide layer has been shown to result in a high circular polarization degree ρ c of the quantum dot emission in the absence of external magnetic field. The physical nature of the phenomenon can be understood in terms of the reciprocity principle taking into account the structural symmetry. At the resonance wavelength, the magnitude of |ρ c | is predicted to exceed 98%. The experimentally achieved value of |ρ c | = 81% is smaller, which is due to the contribution of unpolarized light scattered by grating defects, thus breaking its periodicity. The achieved polarization degree estimated removing the unpolarized nonresonant background from the emission spectra can be estimated to be as high as 96%, close to the theoretical prediction.

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Considerable slowdown of luminescence kinetics of the direct optical transition was discovered in ZnSe/BeTe type‐II heterostructures under high levels of optical pumping. The effect is attributed to forming of a potential barrier for holes in the ZnSe layer due to band bending at high densities of spatially separated carriers. That results in a longer time of the photoexcited holes energy relaxation to their ground state in the BeTe layer. The decrease of overlapping of electron and hole wavefunctions in the ZnSe layer in thick ZnSe/BeTe structures at high levels of optical excitation reveals an additional important effect, that leads to sufficient retardation of radiative recombination time for photoexcited carriers (© 2010 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)