Correction of environmental magnetic fields for the acquisition of Nuclear magnetic relaxation dispersion profiles below Earth’s field

[Display omitted] •A correction of unwanted fields extending the NMRD profiles to ULF is explained.•The oscillating magnetisation is sampled for different correction magnetic fields.•Models are applied to fit the data acquired, measuring the environmental fields.•Validation is achieved by acquiring NMRD profiles from well-known materials.•Results on human cartilage reveal slow motions with potential medical applications. T1 relaxation times can be measured at a range of magnetic field strengths by Fast Field-Cycling (FFC) NMR relaxometry to provide T1-dispersion curves. These are valuable tools for the investigation of material properties as they provide information about molecular dynamics non-invasively. However, accessing information at fields below 230 μT (10kHz proton Larmor frequency) requires careful correction of unwanted environmental magnetic fields. In this work a novel method is proposed that compensates for the environmental fields on a FFC-NMR relaxometer and extends the acquisition of Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation Dispersion profiles to 2.3μT (extremely low field region), with direct application in the study of slow molecular motions. Our method is an improvement of an existing technique, reported by Anoardo and Ferrante in 2003, which exploits the non-adiabatic behaviour of the magnetisation in rapidly-varying magnetic fields and makes use of the oscillation of the signal amplitude to estimate the field strength. This increases the accuracy in measuring the environmental fields and allows predicting the optimal correction values by applying simple equations to fit the data acquired. Validation of the method is performed by comparisons with well-known dispersion curves obtained from polymers and benzene.