Characterization and Suppression Techniques for Degree of Radiation Damping in Inversion Recovery Measurements

Radiation damping is a phenomenon in which transverse nuclear magnetization couples with the current in a coil used in nuclear magnetic resonance experiments. This results in an additional magnetic field that increases the relaxation pathway for the magnetization, which then relaxes back to equilibrium more quickly. Radiation damping has been shown to affect longitudinal relaxation time (T₁) measurement in inversion recovery experiments. In this work, we demonstrate that the extent of radiation damping depends upon the T₁ of the sample. Radiation damping difference spectroscopy is used to characterize the severity of radiation damping, while gradient inversion recovery is used for radiation damping suppression in T₁ measurements. At field strength of 9.4 T, for the radiation damping characteristic time (T_rd) of 50 ms, these investigations show non-negligible radiation damping effects for T₁ values greater than T_rd, with severe distortions for T₁ longer than about 150 ms, showing reasonable agreement with the predicted T_rd. We also report a discrepancy between published expressions for the characteristic radiation damping time.