The effect of Hartmann–Hahn mismatching on polarization inversion spin exchange at the magic angle

Abstract

The effect of the Hartmann–Hahn mismatch Δ= ω eff− ω 1S during polarization inversion spin exchange at the magic angle (PISEMA) has been investigated, where ω eff and ω 1S represent the amplitudes of the 1H effective spin-locking field at the magic angle and the 15N RF spin-locking field, respectively. During the PISEMA evolution period, the exact Hartmann–Hahn match condition (i.e., Δ=0) yields a maximum dipolar scaling factor of 0.816 for PISEMA experiments, while any mismatch results in two different effective fields for the first and second half of each frequency switched Lee–Goldburg (FSLG) cycle. The mismatch effect on the scaling factor depends strongly on the transition angle from one effective field to the other within each FSLG cycle as well as on the cycle time. At low RF spin-lock amplitudes in which the FSLG cycle time is relatively long, the scaling factor rapidly becomes smaller as ω 1S becomes greater than ω eff. On the other hand, when ω 1S< ω eff, there is relatively little effect on the scaling factor with variation in Δ. As a result, the presence of RF inhomogeneities may significantly broaden the line-width in the dipolar dimension because of the mismatch effect. Higher RF spin-lock amplitudes result in a relatively small variation for the scaling factor. Furthermore, ramped amplitude of the 15N RF spin-lock field in synchronization with the flip-flop of the FSLG sequence minimizes the transition angle between the two effective fields within the FSLG cycle. It is shown experimentally that such a ramped amplitude not only gives rise to the same scaling factor but also results in a narrower dipolar line-width in comparison with the rectangular amplitude.