Dressed semiconductor bloch equations: coherence versus Coulomb scatteringin resonantly excited quantum wells

We investigate the role of Coulomb correlation in an electron-hole gas that is strongly driven by an optical pump. Coulomb scattering is treated inclu ding Born diagrams and the light-dressing of the carriers is consistently i ncluded. When the pump is spectrally tuned at the excitonic resonance, the Born correlation is found to weakly affect the fully coherent Hartree-Fock results. Our model calculations fully support recent and quite unexpected o bservations of excitonic Rabi oscillations in III-V quantum wells. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.