On the Rotational Diffusion of Molecules

The Debye model of rotational diffusion by small angular steps is generalized to allow molecular reorientation through angular steps of arbitrarily large size. The generalized diffusion models are found to give a rather accurate representation of molecular reorientation in liquids and gases, as observed in the infrared and Raman spectra of simple molecules. One interesting feature of both the theoretical and experimental correlation functions is that the approach to rotational equilibrium often takes the form of a damped oscillation, rather than the monotonic decay which is usually assumed.