Relaxational signal attenuation during soft refocusing pulses

Quantitative NMR is widely used, but the systematic errors introduced when signals are excited by anything other than a single hard pulse are not always well understood. One important source of error in experiments using soft pulses is the spin relaxation that takes place during pulses, which contains contributions from both spin-spin and spin-lattice relaxation. Here it is shown that relaxation on resonance during shaped soft 180° refocusing pulses in practical experiments can be well represented by biexponential decay, with rate constants R2 and a shape-dependent linear combination of R1 and R2, where R1 and R2 are the inverses of the spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation times T1 and T2. In principle this would allow correction for relaxational losses in experiments using on-resonance selective refocusing pulses.