Perspectives of adiabatic decoupling in liquids

Abstract

It is shown that adiabatic decoupling is extremely flexible and achieves very high figure of merit (decoupling bandwidth to RF amplitude ratio) exceeding that of the conventional composite pulse decoupling (CPD) methods by more than an order of magnitude. This comes at a price of increasingly intrusive cycling sidebands when the decoupling bandwidth exceeds that of the CPD methods. Following a brief review of the decoupling theory and modes of adiabatic sweeps a particular attention is focused on decoupling sideband suppression techniques. The close to perfect inversion profiles of adiabatic pulses ensure by far fewer cyclic sidebands as compared to the typically complex sideband patterns observed in CPD applications. The coherent sideband suppression techniques eliminate the cycling sidebands by altering their phase in successive scans thus achieving sideband reduction levels by up to four orders of magnitude and leaving a clean baseline. We show that adiabatic decoupling is highly adaptive offering significant power savings in spin systems with smaller J-couplings while in the other extreme enabling 13C decoupling of up to a 1 MHz wide bandwidth potentially satisfying the needs of ultra-high-field NMR for the foreseeable future.