Structural properties of 2D NMR relaxation spectra of diffusive systems

Much has been learnt and speculated about the form of 2D NMR relaxation spectra of diffusive systems. Herein we show that the eigen-modes formalism can help to establish a number of fundamental structural properties, i.e. symmetries, overall intensities, signs and relative intensities of the diagonal and cross components, of such spectra, on which one can safely rely in analysing experimental data. More specifically, we prove that the correlation T 1– T 2 spectra will always have negative peaks, thus making questionable the nowadays wide spread strategy in developing inverse Laplace transformation algorithms.