Dancing atoms now understood(subjecting the target to low power radio...)

"The confounding thing", says Grandinetti, "is that for decades adiabatic sweeps worked in many situations, even though the theory predicted that they should not have. To be fair, it wasn't clear that this discrepancy posed a real problem, and most people thought the conventional theoretical approach was doing a fine job in guiding them towards the optimum adiabatic process. It was only after we fully understood the reason for the discrepancy that we realized the conventional theoretical approach contained a flaw that might prevent the optimum adiabatic process from being discovered".

In the recent paper, Grandinetti and his colleagues solve this long-standing puzzle by introducing the concept of super-adiabaticity into the problem. Super-adiabaticity was first described in 1987 by Sir Michael Berry, a mathematical physicist at University of Bristol. When applied to magnetic resonance, it uncovers hidden behavior in the nuclear inversions that researchers had previously considered unrelated to adiabaticity.

Grandinetti and his colleagues describe a mathematical algorithm that can be used to predict the previously mysterious paths that the nuclei took on their way to the proper target state. This revelation, and the mathematical algorithm for its discovery, are particularly exciting as they open the door to new approaches for designing adiabatic processes in magnetic resonance as well as in other related fields.

One example is in a search for an MRI technique that does not require a patient to enter the confines of a large tube. Researchers are trying to exploit the stray fields of large magnets to do MRI, where the magnetic field is not contained only in the interior of a contraption but is leaking to the outside. The field becomes we
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