Line broadening interference for high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectra under inhomogeneous magnetic fields.

Abstract

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy serves as an important tool for analyzing chemicals and biological metabolites. However, its performance is subject to the magnetic-field homogeneity. Under inhomogeneous fields, peaks are broadened to overlap each other, introducing difficulties for assignments. Here, we propose a method termed as line broadening interference (LBI) to provide high-resolution information under inhomogeneous magnetic fields by employing certain gradients in the indirect dimension to interfere the magnetic-field inhomogeneity. The conventional spectral-line broadening is thus interfered to be non-diagonal, avoiding the overlapping among adjacent resonances. Furthermore, an inhomogeneity correction algorithm is developed based on pattern recognition to recover the high-resolution information from LBI spectra. Theoretical deductions are performed to offer systematic and detailed analyses on the proposed method. Moreover, experiments are conducted to prove the feasibility of the proposed method for yielding high-resolution spectra in inhomogeneous magnetic fields.