Dephasing of interacting heavy-hole and light-hole excitons in GaAs quantum wells

We describe a novel three-pulse degenerate four-wave mixing configuration that permits the direct observation of the coherence between the sigma(+) and the sigma(-) 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.