Introduction of the Floquet-Magnus expansion in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy

Abstract

In this article, we present an alternative expansion scheme called Floquet-Magnus expansion (FME) used to solve a time-dependent linear differential equation which is a central problem in quantum physics in general and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in particular. The commonly used methods to treat theoretical problems in solid-state NMR are the average Hamiltonian theory (AHT) and the Floquet theory (FT), which have been successful for designing sophisticated pulse sequences and understanding of different experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of the FME scheme in the context of solid state NMR and we compare this approach with other series expansions. We present a modified FME scheme highlighting the importance of the (time-periodic) boundary conditions. This modified scheme greatly simplifies the calculation of higher order terms and shown to be equivalent to the Floquet theory (single or multimode time-dependence) but allows one to derive the effective Hamiltonian in the Hilbert space. Basic applications of the FME scheme are described and compared to previous treatments based on AHT, FT, and static perturbation theory. We discuss also the convergence aspects of the three schemes (AHT, FT, and FME) and present the relevant references. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.