Microscopic Theory of Optical Dephasing in Semiconductors Dephasing, i.e. the decay of the optical interband polarization in a semiconductor results from destructive interference effects between different microscopic contributions. For a system without any disorder it is shown that the many-body Coulomb correlations lead to excitation-induced dephasing which becomes increasingly important at elevated excitation levels. The effect of disorder-induced dephasing is analyzed for low excitation levels, where the combined influence of excitonic, biexcitonic, and disorder scattering contributions lead to a temporal decay of the four-wave-mixing signal. 71 511-517 511-517 Springer-Verlag