Nuclear relaxation induced by diffusion in confined media; the case of inverted micelles

This work emphasizes the specificities of molecular motions in restricted media observed by NMR. The observation of proton nuclear relaxation of small water pools in AOT reversed micelles has led to separation of dipolar contributions using substitution by deuterium. The water-water contributions to relaxation are easily explained by well-known models and show that water rotational movements are, at most, five times slower than in pure water. The other contributions display a strong frequency dependence with spectrometer frequency and, in order to explain them, a specific dipolar relaxation model was developed between two particles whose movements are restricted to the surface of a sphere and in a concentric sphere respectively. This model was generalized to all cases of diffusion movements of particles in a spherical symmetry environment. In the case of AOT micelles, this model can not explain the experimental results. An elementary discussion taking into account the polar heads specificities and their interactions with water lead to a qualitative interpretation of the experimental data. (author)