Field propagation phenomena in ultra high field NMR: A Maxwell-Bloch formulation

The principal advantage of NMR at high field is the concomitant increase in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This can be traded for improved spatial resolution and combined with parallel imaging to achieve higher temporal resolution. At high field strength, the RF-wavelength and the dimension of the human body complicate the development of NMR coils. For example, at 7 T, the wavelength in free space corresponds to about 1 m. The dielectric constant in tissue with a high water content can be as high as 70 and at a larmor frequency of 300 MHz, this corresponds to a wavelength inside tissue of less than 15 cm. The operating wavelength is thus comparable to the diameter of most body parts. To this end, both temporal and spatial variations of the excitation field must be taken into account in addition to the expected increase in conductivity. For all these reasons, we find the propagation of radiation at ultra high fields (>4 T) new phenomena commonly observed in quantum optics but traditionally negligible in NMR such as phase modulation of the excitation field such that the identity between pulse area and flip angle is no longer valid. In this paper, the emergence of field propagation phenomena in NMR experiments is analytically and numerically demonstrated. It is shown that in addition to the well-studied dielectric resonance phenomena at high magnetic fields (>4 T), field propagation effects transform the excitation pulse into an adiabatic excitation. The high field strength also mean that nonlinear effects such as self-induced transparency are now possible in NMR experiments.