1. Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
2. Optical Sciences Center, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
3. Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA

Correspondence to: G. Khitrova² Email: galina@optics.arizona.edu

Cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) systems allow the study of a variety of fundamental quantum-optics phenomena, such as entanglement, quantum decoherence and the quantum–classical boundary^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}. Such systems also provide test beds for quantum information science. Nearly all strongly coupled cavity QED experiments have used a single atom in a high-quality-factor (high-Q) cavity. Here we report the experimental realization of a strongly coupled system in the solid state: a single quantum dot embedded in the spacer of a nanocavity, showing vacuum-field Rabi splitting exceeding the decoherence linewidths of both the nanocavity and the quantum dot. This requires a small-volume cavity and an atomic-like two-level system^{5, 10}. The photonic crystal¹¹ slab nanocavity—which traps photons when a defect is introduced inside the two-dimensional photonic bandgap by leaving out one or more holes¹²—has both high Q and small modal volume V, as required for strong light–matter interactions¹³. The quantum dot has two discrete energy levels with a transition dipole moment much larger than that of an atom^{14, 15, 16}, and it is fixed in the nanocavity during growth.

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