We report the experimental observation of coherently coupled heavy-hole-light-hole Stark shifts, i.e., light-hole exciton shifts under heavy-hole exciton pumping conditions, in InGaAs quantum wells. The theoretical analysis of the data is based on a full many-body approach (dynamics-controlled truncation formalism) in the third-order nonlinear optical regime. It is shown that the Stark shift data can be interpreted as strong evidence of suitably defined nonradiative intervalence band coherences in a semiconductor quantum well. Hence, the observations establish a semiconductor analog of Raman coherences in three-level atoms.
We investigate the coherent exciton spin dynamics in a single InAlAs/AlGaAs quantum dot using time-resolved quantum state tomography. Under two-LO-phonon quasi-resonant excitation of neutral exciton, we observe pronounced quantum beats in the circular and diagonal polarization components, reflecting the fine-structure splitting (
Δ≈19.6 μeV). By employing a global fitting procedure across three orthogonal polarization bases, we demonstrate that the spin evolution is consistently described by a unified Hamiltonian dominated by the anisotropic exchange interaction. While the initial degree of circular polarization is limited to
≈0.28 due to fast relaxation processes during carrier cooling, the subsequent dynamics reveal a long-lived spin coherence (
1.1±0.2 ns) that exceeds the exciton lifetime (
∼767 ps). Our analysis reveals that the spin-formation time is significantly shorter than the instrument response function, and the absence of a discernible Overhauser shift confirms a negligible influence from the local nuclear environment under the present conditions. These results provide a quantitative benchmark for the three-dimensional reconstruction of spin trajectories using differential polarization signals, demonstrating the feasibility of using quasi-resonant excitation for stable spin initialization in semiconductor nanostructures.