We present the optical tomography of the probability density of quasiparticles, the microcavity polaritons, confined in three dimensions by cylindrical traps. Collecting the photoluminescence emitted by the quasimodes under continuous nonresonant laser excitation, we reconstruct a three-dimensional mapping of the photoluminescence, from which we can extract the spatial distribution of the confined states at any energy. We discuss the impact of the confinement geometry on the wave function patterns and give an intuitive understanding in terms of a light-matter quasiparticle confined in a box. © 2009 American Institute of Physics. ͓DOI: 10.1063/1.3126022͔Probing wave functions or probability densities ͑PDs͒ of confined carriers in semiconductor nanostructures is a very elegant way of retrieving textbook solutions of quantum confinement. It could also provide key information on the coupling between different nanostructures. To confine electrons and holes in semiconductor materials, traps in the nanometer range must be engineered due to the small de Broglie wavelength of the carriers. This reduced size generally prevents the optical imaging of the PDs of charge carriers. Sophisticated techniques such as insertion of probe layers, 1,2 magnetotransport measurements, 3 or magnetotunneling 4 allowed however to reconstruct the spatial variation of confined carrier PDs in the growth ͑vertical͒ direction of a quantum well ͑QW͒. Nevertheless, such techniques are dedicated to the study of PDs along a single confinement axis. They cannot be applied in the case of two-dimensional ͑2D͒ or threedimensional ͑3D͒ confining potentials. The study of the inplane ͑lateral͒ spatial extension of electronic wave functions is generally restricted to metallic surfaces and films, using scanning tunneling microscopy 5,6 or synchrotron radiation.
7The only measurement of fully confined carriers PDs has been achieved using near-field scanning optical microscopy and does not provide a significant resolution to access the spatial variation of the PDs inside the traps. In our work, we take advantage of the coupling between carriers and light in semiconductor microcavities. In the strong coupling regime, the interaction between excitons ͑Coulomb-correlated electron-hole pairs͒ and photons gives rise to the formation of quasiparticles called excitonpolaritons, split in two branches, the upper and lower polaritons.9 Their dispersion, being dominated by the photonic component, gives them an effective mass 10 4 smaller than the free electron mass. Consequently, they can be confined in micrometer-scale traps, above the resolution of optical microscopes. Moreover, as intracavity polaritons are directly coupled to extracavity photons, with energy and momentum conservation, 10 polaritonic states can be directly imaged through optical detection of the photoluminescence ͑PL͒ at the surface of the sample. We previously engineered a GaAs/AlAs microcavity featuring traps for the photonic modes and a single embedded InGaAs quantum well. The traps for the photon...