Isotropic diffusion weighting in PGSE NMR by magic-angle spinning of the q-vector

When PGSE NMR is applied to water in microheterogeneous materials such as liquid crystals, foodstuffs, porous rocks, and biological tissues, the signal attenuation is often multi-exponential, indicating the presence of pores having a range of sizes or anisotropic domains having a spread of orientations. Here we modify the standard PGSE experiment by introducing low-amplitude harmonically modulated gradients, which effectively make the q-vector perform magic-angle spinning (MAS) about an axis fixed in the laboratory frame. With this new technique, denoted q-MAS PGSE, the signal attenuation depends on the isotropic average of the local diffusion tensor. The capability of q-MAS PGSE to distinguish between pore size and domain orientation dispersion is demonstrated by experiments on a yeast cell suspension and a polydomain anisotropic liquid crystal. In the latter case, the broad distribution of apparent diffusivities observed with PGSE is narrowed to its isotropic average with q-MAS PGSE in a manner that is analogous to the narrowing of chemical shift anisotropy powder patterns using magic-angle sample spinning in solid-state NMR. The new q-MAS PGSE technique could be useful for resolving size/orientation ambiguities in the interpretation of PGSE data from, e.g., water confined within the axons of human brain tissue.