A New Wavelet Denoising Method for Experimental Time-Domain Signals: Pulsed Dipolar Electron Spin Resonance

We adapt a new wavelet-transform-based method of denoising experimental signals to pulse-dipolar electron-spin resonance spectroscopy (PDS). We show that signal averaging times of the time-domain signals can be reduced by as much as 2 orders of magnitude, while retaining the fidelity of the underlying signals, in comparison with noiseless reference signals. We have achieved excellent signal recovery when the initial noisy signal has an SNR ≳ 3. This approach is robust and is expected to be applicable to other time-domain spectroscopies. In PDS, these time-domain signals representing the dipolar interaction between two electron spin labels are converted into their distance distribution functions P(r), usually by regularization methods such as Tikhonov regularization. The significant improvements achieved by using denoised signals for this regularization are described. We show that they yield P(r)'s with more accurate detail and yield clearer separations of respective distances, which is especially important when the P(r)'s are complex. Also, longer distance P(r)'s, requiring longer dipolar evolution times, become accessible after denoising. In comparison to standard wavelet denoising approaches, it is clearly shown that the new method (WavPDS) is superior.