  A fiber taper waveguide is used to perform direct optical spectroscopy of a
microdisk-quantum-dot system, exciting the system through the photonic (light)
channel rather than the excitonic (matter) channel. Strong coupling, the regime
of coherent quantum interactions, is demonstrated through observation of vacuum
Rabi splitting in the transmitted and reflected signals from the cavity. The
fiber coupling method also allows the examination of the system's steady-state
nonlinear properties, where saturation of the cavity-QD response is observed
for less than one intracavity photon.
