  We analyze decoherence of an electron in a double-dot due to the interaction
with acoustic phonons. For large tunneling rates between the quantum dots, the
main contribution to decoherence comes from the phonon emission relaxation
processes, while for small tunneling rates, the virtual-phonon, dephasing
processes dominate. Our results show that in common semiconductors, such as Si
and GaAs, the latter mechanism determines the upper limit for the double-dot
charge qubit performance measure.
