Singular Value Decomposition Method To Determine Distance Distributions in Pulsed Dipolar Electron Spin Resonance:...

This paper is a continuation of the method introduced by Srivastava and Freed (2017) that is a new method based on truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) for obtaining physical results from experimental signals without any need for Tikhonov regularization or other similar methods that require a regularization parameter. We show here how to estimate the uncertainty in the SVD-generated solutions. The uncertainty in the solution may be obtained by finding the minimum and maximum values over which the solution remains converged. These are obtained from the optimum range of singular value contributions, where the width of this region depends on the solution point location (e.g., distance) and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the signal. The uncertainty levels typically found are very small with substantial SNR of the (denoised) signal, emphasizing the reliability of the method. With poorer SNR, the method is still satisfactory but with greater uncertainty, as expected. Pulsed dipolar electron spin resonance spectroscopy experiments are used as an example, but this TSVD approach is general and thus applicable to any similar experimental method wherein singular matrix inversion is needed to obtain the physically relevant result. We show that the Srivastava-Freed TSVD method along with the estimate of uncertainty can be effectively applied to pulsed dipolar electron spin resonance signals with SNR > 30, and even for a weak signal (e.g., SNR ≈ 3) reliable results are obtained by this method, provided the signal is first denoised using wavelet transforms (WavPDS).