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Prof Igor Serša, PhD from the Department of Solid State Physics F5 published an article in Journal of magnetic resonance with the title Comparison of driven equilibrium and standard spin-echo sequence in MR microscopy: Analysis of signal dependence on RF pulse imperfection and diffusion. Fast MR imaging of samples with long NMR relaxation times is often challenging. In this study, a solution to this problem is proposed, based on the use of a spin-echo (SE) sequence for MR imaging, upgraded with a driven equilibrium method. The proposed (DE-SE) sequence was first theoretically analyzed and later verified by experiments on test samples performed on a 9.4 T system for MR microscopy. Experiments on water have shown that the DE-SE sequence can produce about 10 times more signal than the SE sequence. The presented DE-SE sequence has proven to be effective for fast imaging of samples with long T1 relaxation times in MR microscopy and is therefore also suitable for fast proton density weighted imaging of materials.

Samo Kralj from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics F5 and colleagues from The Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Ljubljana have published an article in the journal Nanomaterials. They numerically studied localized elastic distortions in curved, effectively two-dimensional nematic shells using a mesoscopic Helfrich-Landau-de Gennes-type approach. They limited our theoretical consideration to axially symmetric shapes. They determined conditions for which nonsingular line-like localized nematic distortions could appear enabled by order reconstruction mechanism.