Correlation effect of Rabi oscillations of excitons in quantum dots

We performed a transient four-wave mixing experiment on a strain-compensated InAs quantum dot (QD) ensemble over a wide range of excitation intensities. Under the resonant excitation of an exciton ground state, an extremely long dephasing time of 1 ns was found. By increasing the areas of the excitation pulses, Rabi oscillations of excitonic polarizations were clearly observed. The corresponding Rabi frequency is three orders of magnitude higher than the measured dephasing rate. For larger pulse areas, we found that the deviation of experimental data from two-level predictions became significant. The deviations cannot be explained by taking into account, as has been suggested in other research, excitation density-dependent dephasing or Hartree–Fock-type Coulomb interactions between excitons.