The ultrafast relaxation of excitons in GaAs, coherently excited by a short optical pulse and subjected to collisions with free carriers and noncoherent excitons which are independently created by a second synchronized light pulse, is studied directly in the time domain by a probing of the excitonic phase coherence. The relaxation rates reveal strong exciton-exciton scattering with a collision efficiency of 1.6 \ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{} ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$
cm3 ${\mathrm{s}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ and even 10 times more efficient exciton-free-carrier scattering.
Summary form only given. The ultrafast nonlinear optical response of semiconductor-microcavities (SMCs) in the nonperturbative regime is attracting growing interest for exploring fundamental light-matter interactions in many-particle quantum systems, as well as for the future implementations of ultrafast photonic devices. In spite of many investigations, the coherent dynamics of excitonic nonlinear-response in the nonperturbative regime has not been fully understood. Open questions are how strong exciton-cavity coupling affects exciton-exciton (X-X) interactions, and how in turn the X-X correlation influences the nonlinear response of SmCs. We investigate these open questions and show that the nonperturbative regime provides an unprecedented tool for investigating four-particle correlations.We start from the equations for the third order exciton polarization and cavity field describing quantum optical effects and coherent nonlinear optics in SMCs, perform the semiclassical factorization and include multiple scattering processes.
We report on coherent control of the fundamental exciton state in a single quantum dot by means of two phase-locked picosecond laser pulses. By analyzing the experiments performed in the Rabi regime and comparing them to numerical simulations, we show that we can address the exciton coherence and get an insight into the involved dephasing processes. The total decoherence time
T2 (170 ps) is comparable to the effective exciton lifetime
T1 (200 ps), although not reaching the upper theoretical limit of
2T1. We conclude that energy relaxation and pure dephasing processes due to virtual scattering with phonons both contribute on an equal footing to the loss of coherence in this kind of monolayer-step-induced GaAs quantum dots.