A unified view of coherent and incoherent dihydrogen exchange in transition metal hydrides by nuclear resonance and inelastic neutron scattering

In this paper a unified view of coherent and incoherent dihydrogen exchange in transition metal hydrides by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and inelastic neutron scattering (INS) is presented. It is shown that both exchange processes coexist i.e. do not transform into each other although they may dominate the spectra in different temperature ranges. This superposition is the consequence of the incorporation of the tunnel frequency J of the coherent process into the nuclear two-spin hamiltonian of hydrogen pairs which allows to treat the problem using the well known density matrix theory of NMR line-shapes developed by Alexander and Binsch. It is shown that this theory can also be used to predict the line-shapes of the rotational tunneling transitions observed in the INS spectra of transition metal dihydrogen complexes and that both NMR and INS spectra depend on similar parameters.