Detecting the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction by means of pulsed EPR spectroscopy

The Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya (DM) interaction is induced by the spin–orbit interaction with an antisymmetric component in the exchange coupling. We have examined a possibility to detect the DM interaction as well as the non-secular part of the dipolar interaction for weakly-coupled systems by analyzing relaxation processes from the double to single quantum coherence by pulsed EPR measurement. Numerical simulation for two and three spin-1/2 systems indicates that the proposed measurement has a capability to determine the signs of the DM interactions that are important to distinguish spins in a uniform field from in a staggered field.