Frequency Domain Processing of NMR Data

There are two basic processing steps in the frequency domain, phase correction followed by baseline correction. These steps are necessary because in a real NMR experiment the spectrometer, the sample and the experimental parameters are not perfect in contrast to NMR-SIM which represents the ideal experiment. These imperfections can lead to distortions in the lineshape and a non-linear baseline that must be corrected to enable reliable spectral analysis and interpretation using integration and multiplet analysis. Although not a typical application for NMR-SIM these distortions can be simulated as illustrated in Check its 3.2.3.4 to 3.2.3.6. 

A property of excitation pulses and the receiver channel is their phases and as outlined in section 2.3.3 appropriate phase cycling is necessary for both coherence selection and also to compensate for the phase differences between the detected 

In real experiments after Fourier transformed the lineshapes are mixtures of absorptive and dispersive signals and are related to the delayed FID acquisition (first-order phase error). The delayed acquisition is a consequence of the minimum time required to change the spectrometer from transmit to receive mode, during this delay the magnetization vectors process according to their chemical shift frequencies. The zero-order phase error arises because of the phase difference between the magnetization vectors and the receiver. In NMR-SIM the delayed acquisition is not necessary because the ideal spectrometer approach does not require any switching time and the first order phase correction is normally zero if no other sources of phase deviations are present. 

In Check it 3.23.4 the reader is introduced to the phase correction procedure in ID WIN-NMR whilst examining zero- and first-order phase distortions. An advantage of the 

NMR-SIM simulation is that the zero- and first-order phase distortions can be investigated separately in contrast to experimental spectra where both errors occur simultaneously. In the first part of Check it 3.2.3.4 the zero-order phase distortion is simulated using a 40° phase shift difference between the excitation pulse and the receiver phase, in the second part the first-order phase distortion is simulated using a delay dlO before the data acquisition. The spin system used in the Check it consists of a number of singlets evenly spaced over a frequency range of 3200 Hz. 

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