Spin relaxation: is there anything new under the Sun?

Abstract

Spin relaxation has been at the core of many studies since the early days of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and the underlying theory worked out by its founding fathers. This Bloch–Redfield–Abraham relaxation theory has been recently reinvestigated (Bengs and Levitt, 2020) in the perspective of Lindblad theory of quantum Markovian master equations in order to account for situations where the widely used semi-classical relaxation theory breaks down. In this article, we review the conventional approach of quantum mechanical theory of NMR relaxation and show that, under the usual assumptions, it is equivalent to the Lindblad formulation. We also comment on the debate on semi-classical versus quantum versions of spectral density functions involved in relaxation.