  Excitation of a semiconductor quantum dot with a chirped laser pulse allows
excitons to be created by rapid adiabatic passage. In quantum dots this process
can be greatly hindered by the coupling to phonons. Here we add a high chirp
rate to ultra-short laser pulses and use these pulses to excite a single
quantum dot. We demonstrate that we enter a regime where the exciton-phonon
coupling is effective for small pulse areas, while for higher pulse areas a
decoupling of the exciton from the phonons occurs. We thus discover a
reappearance of rapid adiabatic passage, in analogy to the predicted
reappearance of Rabi rotations at high pulse areas. The measured results are in
good agreement with theoretical calculations.
