At very low temperatures, the properties of amorphous solids are dominated by atomic tunneling systems. Due to their simple and microscopically well known strucuture, doped alkali halides, such as KCl:Li, can be regarded as model systems and often play an important role in investigating the behaviour of tunneling systems. If the tunneling particle carries a nuclear quadrupole moment, a splitting of the tunneling levels will occur. In polarization echo experiments, these energy-splittings lead to a dephasing mechanism, which manifests in a quantum beating of the decay and a magnetic field dependency of the echo amplitude. In the current study, further measurements on KCl:6Li and KCl:7Li, as well as numerical calculations based on a microscopic model of KCl:Li, have been performed. In order to explain the absence of an expected isotope effect when comparing both samples, a model taking the interaction between the Li+-defect and the surrounding ions of the host crystal is developed, leading to a good agreement with experimental results. Therefore the environment of the Li-ion must be regarded as part of the tunneling system, which nuclear properties are dominated by the near neighbour K+- and Cl--ions. |