Instrumental lineshape deconvolution

In principle we could deconvolute the experimental spectrum with the instrumental lineshape, if that were known, to recover the true spectrum. In our example we have some good experimental evidence as to the form of the instrumental lineshape since the acetone signal is (apart from small carbon-13 satellites) a singlet, its experimental shape is just the instrumental lineshape convoluted by a Lorentzian of width l/(7rr2 ), where is the spin-spin relaxation time of the acetone protons. How can we use this experimental evidence to correct the imperfect experimental spectrum The simplest way to deconvolute one function fi uj) by another f2 ( ) is to Fourier transform the ratio of their inverse Fourier transforms ... 

The corrected free induction decay Sc t) will transform to a spectrum Sc i ) in which not only the acetone signal but also all the ethanol signals have had the instrumental contributions to their lineshapes removed. Provided that the reference region lui to wr gives a complete and accurate representation of the experimental acetone lineshape, our deconvolution process should allow us to obtain a clean corrected spectrum even when the shimming is far from ideal. There are of course limitations on this process. If the experimental lineshape is very broad, it will clearly not be possible to obtain a corrected spectrum in which the lines are very narrow without some sort of penalty. Here the limiting factor is signal-to-noise ratio since S u>) is much sharper than Se u>), the ratio of their inverse Fourier... 

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