Modification of Spontaneous Radiation in the Presence of a 3-D Thin Dielectric Microdisk and Partial Justification of the 2-D Effective Index Model

The spontaneous emission of a molecular dipole in the presence of a thin dielectric microdisk is studied as a 3D solution of Maxwell’s equations with two-sided generalized boundary conditions, local energy finiteness, and a radiation condition at infinity. Results show the radiative and non-radiative decay rates display resonance maxima associated with the disk natural frequencies which can be well explained through the effective- refractive-index approximation.