Efficient Time Propagation Technique for MAS NMR Simulation: Application to Quadrupolar Nuclei

The quantum mechanical Floquet theory is investigated in order to derive an efficient way of performing numerical calculations of the dynamics of nuclear spin systems in MAS NMR experiments. Here, we take advantage of time domain integration of the quantum evolution over one period as proposed by Edenet al.(1). But a full investigation of the propagatorU(t,t₀), and especially its dependence with respect totandt₀within a formalized approach, leads to further simplifications and to a substantial reduction in computation time when performing powder averaging for any complex sequence. Such an approximation is suitable for quadrupolar nuclei (I> 1/2) and can be applied to the simulation of the RIACT (rotational induced adiabatic coherence transfer) phenomenon that occurs under special experimental conditions in spin locking experiments (2–4). The present method is also compared to the usual infinite dimensional Floquet space approach (5, 6), which is shown to be rather inefficient. As far as we know, it has never been reported for quadrupolar nuclei withI≥ 3/2 in spin locking experiments. The method can also be easily extended to other areas of spectroscopy.