Abstract
We present a general theoretical description of the extrinsic dephasing mechanism of spectral diffusion that dominates the decoherence dynamics in semiconductor quantum dots at low temperature. We discuss the limits of random telegraph and Gaussian stochastic noises and show that the combination of both approaches in the framework of the pre-Gaussian noise theory allows a quantitative interpretation of high-resolution experiments in single semiconductor quantum dots. We emphasize the generality and the versatility of our model where the inclusion of asymmetric jump processes appears as an essential extension for the understanding of semiconductor quantum dot physics.