Using photoluminescence spectroscopy, we have investigated the nature of Rabi oscillation damping during active manipulation of excitonic qubits in self-assembled quantum dots. Rabi oscillations were recorded by varying the pulse amplitude for fixed pulse durations between 4 ps and 10 ps. Up to 5 periods are visible, making it possible to quantify the excitation dependent damping. We find that this damping is more pronounced for shorter pulse widths and show that its origin is the non-resonant excitation of carriers in the wetting layer, most likely involving bound-to-continuum and continuum-to-bound transitions. Hz, 78.47.+p, 78.55.Cr The current topic of quantum computation presents a wide range of challenges to physical science [1], particularly the search for candidates for solid-state quantum bits (qubits). Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) are attractive because they possess energy structures and coherent optical properties similar to, and dipole moments larger than, those of atoms [2,3]. Efforts in the past few years have led to successful observations of Rabi oscillations (ROs) of excitonic states [4][5][6][7][8][9], the hallmark for active manipulation of qubits in QDs. However, all found that ROs damped out very quickly when the external field is increased. Because QDs contain a macroscopic number of atoms, this strong decoherence process must be due to unwanted coupling to other degrees of freedom.Identification of the underlying mechanism is difficult precisely because of this macroscopic nature. Yet such understanding plays the most crucial role in future development of quantum information technology in semiconductors. Through manipulations of high quality factor excitonic qubits in InGaAs QDs, we have studied the underlying mechanism for decoherence processes during active manipulation. More specifically, we have found that this strong decoherence process is manifested through indirect excitations of carriers in the wetting layer whose composition is highly fluctuating.We study In 0.5 Ga 0.5 As self-assembled QD (SAQD) samples grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The details of growth processes are given in [10]. These QDs are 3 3 embedded in a GaAs matrix with a wetting layer of roughly 5 monolayers thickness. The dots have an average lateral size, height, and dot-to-dot distance of 20-40 nm, 4.5 nm and 100 nm, respectively, characterized using cross-sectional scanning tunnelling microscopy. There are three excitonic levels involved: The exciton vacuum (labelled as |0Ú) when there is no electron-hole pair present, the single exciton ground state, (labelled as |2Ú), and the first excited state of the exciton (labelled as |1Ú). The qubit is based on the two level system formed by |0Ú and |1Ú. The exciton ground state |2Ú is a spectator state used to monitor the population of state |1Ú. This is possible because |1Ú decays nonradiatively to |2Ú long before it can radiatively decay to |0Ú. The state |1Ú then decays radiatively to |0Ú and is detected as the photoluminescence (PL) signal as summariz...