  To the present day, the Beenakker-Mazur (BM) method is the most comprehensive
statistical physics approach to the calculation of short-time transport
properties of colloidal suspensions. A revised version of the BM method with an
improved treatment of hydrodynamic interactions is presented and evaluated
regarding the rotational short-time self-diffusion coefficient, $D^r$ , of
suspensions of charged particles interacting by a hard-sphere plus screened
Coulomb (Yukawa) pair potential. To assess the accuracy of the method,
elaborate simulations of $D^r$ have been performed, covering a broad range of
interaction parameters and particle concentrations. The revised BM method is
compared in addition with results by a simplifying pairwise additivity (PA)
method in which the hydrodynamic interactions are treated on a two-body level.
The static pair correlation functions re- quired as input to both theoretical
methods are calculated using the Rogers-Young integral equation scheme. While
the revised BM method reproduces the general trends of the simulation results,
it systematically and significantly underestimates the rotational diffusion
coefficient. The PA method agrees well with the simulation data at lower volume
fractions, but at higher concentrations $D^r$ is likewise underestimated. For a
fixed value of the pair potential at mean particle distance comparable to the
thermal energy, $D^r$ increases strongly with increasing Yukawa potential
screening parameter.
