Apodization of 2D Data

In the interest of data collection time and disk storage space, 2D data sets are often collected with short t2 acquisition times and as few as possible t1 slices. In such cases, the FID's in the t2 domain do not decay into the noise and the interferograms in the t1 domain do not decay completely. Applying a 2D Fourier transform to such truncated data will cause ripples in the 2D frequency domain spectrum analogous to those observed in 1D spectra where the acquisition time is too short. The application of an appropriate apodization function (and/or forward linear prediction) to the t2 and t1 domains is important to produce high quality spectra. The figure below illustrates the effect of the more common apodization functions on the cross peak in the phase sensitive COSY spectrum of ethyl acetate. The panel on the upper left shows the appearance of the cross peak when no apodization is applied. One can easily see the ripples in both the F2 and F1 frequency domains. The panel on the upper right shows the effect of applying a 2 Hz exponential line broadening function to each domain. The data are improved but the ripples are still visible. The panel on the lower left shows the effect of applying a sine bell weighting function with the maximum at the midpoint of each of the t2 and t1 domains. This apodization function is suitable for magnitude mode data where the phase is irrelevant. In this example of a phase sensitive data set, one can see a major distortion in the cross peak. The panel on the lower right shows the effect of using a sine squared weighting function with the maximum at the beginning of the t2 and t1 signals. The spectrum is free of ripples and clearly shows the phase information.