The highest 19th-order longitudinal optical (LO) phonon-mediated relaxation was observed in photoluminescence excitation spectra of CdTe self-assembled quantum dots grown in ZnTe. Hot excitons photoexcited highly in the ZnTe barrier layer are relaxed into the wetting-layer state by emitting multiple LO phonons of the barrier layer successively. Below the wetting-layer state, the LO phonons involved in the relaxation are transformed to those of interfacial ZnxCd1-xTe surrounding CdTe quantum dots. The ZnTe-like and CdTe-like LO phonons of ZnxCd1-xTe and lastly acoustic phonons are emitted in the relaxation into the CdTe dots. The observed main relaxation is the fast relaxation directly into CdTe quantum dots and is not the relaxation through either the wetting-layer quantum well or the band bottom of the ZnTe barrier layer. This observation shows very efficient optical phonon-mediated relaxation of hot excitons excited highly in the ZnTe conduction band through not only the ZnTe extended state but also localized state in the CdTe quantum dots reflecting strong exciton-LO phonon interaction of telluride compounds. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.