Electron-spin decoherence in trityl radicals in the absence and presence of microwave irradiation

Abstract. Trityl radicals feature prominently as polarizing agents in solid-state dynamic nuclear polarization experiments and as spin labels in distance distribution measurements by pulsed dipolar EPR spectroscopy techniques. Electron-spin coherence lifetime is a main determinant of performance in these applications. We show that protons in these radicals contribute substantially to decoherence, although the radicals were designed with the aim of reducing proton hyperfine interaction. By spin dynamics simulations, we can trace back the nearly complete Hahn echo decay for a Finland trityl radical variant within 7 μs to the contribution from tunnelling of the 36 methyl protons in the radical core. This contribution, as well as the contribution of methylene protons in OX063 and OX071 trityl radicals, to Hahn echo decay can be predicted rather well by the previously introduced analytical pair product approximation. In contrast, predicting decoherence of electron spins dressed by a microwave field proves to be a hard problem where correlations between more than two protons contribute substantially. Cluster correlation expansion (CCE) becomes borderline numerically unstable  already at order 3 at times comparable to the decoherence time T_2ρ and cannot be applied at order 4. We introduce partial CCE that alleviates this problem and reduces computational effort at the expense of treating only part of the correlations at a particular order. Nevertheless, dressed-spin decoherence simulations for systems with more than 100 protons remain out of reach, whereas they provide only semi-quantitative predictions for 24 to 48 protons. Our experimental and simulation results indicate that solid-state magnetic resonance experiments with trityl radicals will profit from perdeuteration of the compounds.