Rapid development of microfabrication and assembly of nanostructures has opened up many opportunities to miniaturize structures that confine light, producing unusual and extremely interesting optical properties. Microcavities addresses the large variety of optical phenomena taking place in confined solid state structures: microcavities. Realisations include planar and pillar microcavities, whispering gallery modes, and photonic crystals. The microcavities represent a unique laboratory for quantum optics and photonics. They exhibit a number of beautiful effects including lasing, superfluidity,...

Microcavities are semiconductor, metal, or dielectric structures providing optical confinement in one, two or three dimensions. At the end of the 20th century, microcavities have attracted attention due to the discovery of a strong exciton-light coupling regime allowing for the formation of superposition light-matter quasiparticles: exciton-polaritons. In the following century several remarkable effects have been discovered in microcavities, including the Bose-Einstein condensation of exciton-polaritons, polariton lasing, superfluidity, optical spin Hall and spin Meissner effects, amongst...