Perturbative harmonic modulation of longitudinal electron-spin magnetization for short T(1) determination.

Longitudinally detected T1 measurement scheme (LOD-T1) is studied in detail. In contrast to the original work on LOD-T1, using high power microwave pulses, this work deals with general and practically frequent cases in which perfect inversion of the electron-spin magnetization is not feasible due to the effect of relaxation during microwave pulses. Theoretical studies, numerical simulations, and experiments reveal a pair of separate contributions of the dynamics of the longitudinal magnetization to the LOD signal, namely, the periodic modulation and the relaxation contributions. The latter alone which is of interest can be extracted to give relaxation curves. In addition, it is shown that T1 information can be obtained even when the available microwave power is so low that the electron magnetization can only be perturbatively modulated, at the cost of reduced sensitivity. To overcome this, a modified pulse sequence is proposed. In this new method, the pulse excitations are repeated during half a period of the resonance of the longitudinal detection circuit. The method is called the perturbative harmonic modulation method for longitudinally detected T1 measurement (HM-LOD-T1). HM-LOD-T1 experiments are demonstrated in 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH).