This page is among our 'good articles'. It should/could be further expanded but we hope that it will still be useful in its present stage.Absorptive and dispersive optical responses of excitons in a single quantum dot. B. Alén, A. Högele, M. Kroner, S. Seidl, K. Karrai, R. J. Warburton, A. Badolato, G. Medeiros-Ribeiro and P. M. Petroff in Appl. Phys. Lett. 89:123124 (2006).  What the paper says!?

In this letter we report simultaneous detection of forward and backward Rayleigh scatterings of narrow-band laser light by a single QD.

This is the quantum dot counterpart of the extinction method use by molecule people. A Fabry-Pérot interferometer admixes the driving laser with the coherent part of the signal (Rayleigh scattering).

The paper is well-detailed but more technical than molecular treatments, using transfer matrices and an overall less clear terminology/discussion, of what is, however, essentially the same.

Our results demonstrate clearly that the reflectivity signal can be modeled in detail to provide the oscillator strength and decoherence rate of the optical transition.