Abstract
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the behavior of the confined dark exciton in an InAs/GaAs semiconductor quantum dot, under the application of an external magnetic field in Voigt configuration. We show that by varying the magnitude and direction of the external field one can accurately control the dark-exciton fine-structure splitting. In addition, we show that the dark-exciton spin state is approximately polarized along the cubic crystallographic directions [100] or equivalents. By comparing our experimental results with a model for the exchange and Zeeman interactions, we find the conditions for nullifying the fine-structure splitting between the two eigenstates of the dark exciton, thereby stopping its qubit precession.