Direct NMR T1 distribution measurement without using ill-posed fitting methods.

Abstract

The usual Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) experiments for measuring spin-lattice relaxation time (T1) distributions are Inversion-Recovery (IR) and Saturation-Recovery (SR), followed by data processing based on ill-posed multi-exponential curve fitting methods. Recently, a new method combining SR and IR, called Saturation-Inversion-Recovery (SIR), has been proposed to obtain sharper T1-dependences than IR and SR. In this article, we propose an appropriate combination of SIR signals to directly obtain T1 distributions without using any multi-exponential fitting methods.