Electron spin relaxation due to reorientation of a permanent zero field splitting tensor.

Electron spin relaxation of transition metal ions with spin S> or =1 results primarily from thermal modulation of the zero field splitting (zfs) tensor. This occurs both by distortion of the zfs tensor due to intermolecular collisions and, for complexes with less than cubic symmetry, by reorientational modulation of the permanent zfs tensor. The reorientational mechanism is much less well characterized in previous work than the distortional mechanism although it is an important determinant of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) paramagnetic relaxation enhancement phenomena (i.e., the enhancement of NMR relaxation rates produced by paramagnetic ions in solution or NMR-PRE). The classical density matrix theory of spin relaxation does not provide an appropriate description of the reorientational mechanism at low Zeeman field strengths because the zero-order spin wave functions are stochastic functions of time. Using spin dynamics simulation techniques, the time correlation functions of the spin operators have been computed and used to determine decay times for the reorientational relaxation mechanism for S=1. In the zfs limit of laboratory field strengths (H(Zeem)< or =H(Zeem), and that its neglect can lead to serious errors in the interpretation of NMR-PRE data.