Coherent and dissipative phenomena induced by transient adsorption of xenon-131 on a glass surface were studied by NMR spectroscopy. The authors report the results of multiple-quantum filtered expts. over a range of temps., covering different relaxation regimes. An anal. in terms of an effective Liouvillian is proposed, the complex eigenvalues of which may be directly extd. from the exptl. spectra. For this purpose, the authors apply recently developed techniques for spectral anal., in particular decimated signal diagonalization. The results are compared with a conventional fit of the multiple-quantum build-up behavior. [on SciFinder (R)]