Measurement of longitudinal and rotating frame relaxation times through fully J-decoupled homonuclear spectra.

It is shown that fully J-decoupled homonuclear spectra involving Lorentzian lines can be readily obtained by straightforward processing of the 2D data arising from a conventional spin echo sequence (pi/2-t(1)/2-pi-t(1)/2-Acq(t(2))) used in the so-called J-resolved experiment. The method simply rests on power spectra with the drawback of lines having meaningless relative intensities. In principle, the experiment should also yield transverse relaxation times. Several tests demonstrate that this is not so, due to pulse imperfections and nonresolved long-range J couplings. Conversely, longitudinal and rotating frame relaxation times can be easily determined by means of an appropriate preparation period (for instance, a saturation-recovery period in the case of longitudinal relaxation) inserted before the 2D spin echo sequence. Since one is dealing with a single line per nucleus, relaxation measurements become reliable and accurate. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.