The importance of disorder in very high quality semiconductor microcavities

We investigate a semiconductor microcavity containing a quantum well, a sample of exceptional quality. We observe a four-wave mixing response which resembles that of an inhomogeneously broadened exciton system, while the linear transmission measurements are affected by the homogeneous part of the broadening and have a completely different decay time. We show that the four-wave mixing response cannot be calculated using the excitonic parameters (linewidth and relaxation time) extracted from the linear transmission measurements, as the coupling of exciton and photon states deeply modifies the scattering channels.