Dephasing of excited-state excitons in InGaAs quantum dots

We measure the dephasing time of the first optically-active excited-state excitonic transition in strongly confined InGaAs quantum dots using transient four-wave mixing. The optically-driven excited-state polarization shows a bi-exponential decay with a significant fraction of the probed excited states exhibiting a very long dephasing time, in the nanosecond range at 10 K. The full time-dependent four-wave mixing polarization is microscopically calculated by taking into account both virtual and real acoustic phonon-assisted transitions. The bi-exponential decay is qualitatively explained by a model of two-bright excitonic excited states non-degenerate in the absence of in-plane cylindrical symmetry. (C) 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.