Dephasing of interacting heavy-hole and light-hole excitons in GaAs quantum wells Meier, Torsten Bott, K. Mayer, E.J. Smith, G.O. Heuckeroth, V. Hübner, M. Kuhl, J. Schulze, A. Lindberg, M. Koch, S.W. Thomas, P. Hey, R. Ploog, K. We describe a novel three-pulse degenerate four-wave mixing configuration that permits the direct observation of the coherence between the σ+ and the σ− exciton states in a GaAs quantum well excited in a two-photon process. It is found that the phase coherence between the two single heavy-hole exciton states decays with a time constant that is considerably longer than the dephasing time of the coherence between these states and the ground state (interband coherence). All the experimental data are well described by numerical solutions of the optical Bloch equations for a phenomenological multilevel model. Optica Publishing Group 1996 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/43413 Meier T, Bott K, Mayer EJ, et al. Dephasing of interacting heavy-hole and light-hole excitons in GaAs quantum wells. <i>Journal of the Optical Society of America B</i>. 1996;13(5):1026-1030. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1364/JOSAB.13.001026">10.1364/JOSAB.13.001026</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1364/JOSAB.13.001026 info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess