Can Zero-Filling Correct the Baseline?
I want to show you a proton spectrum that has puzzled me during the last weeks. It contains something that's quite typical and something that I can't explain. I have processed the spectrum in two different ways, with zero-filling and without it. The spectrum without zero-filling is black, the spectrum with zero-filling is green (the number of points is doubled).
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Without zero-filling, we have only half of the points. They correspond to the maxima on the left of the peak and to the minima on the right of it. Any program for automatic phase correction is fooled by asymmetric peaks like this. Even humans are often fooled. They think that the spectrum is "difficult to phase" and don't recognize that the peak is asymmetric. Asymmetry and ringing are two sides of the same coin. Without zero-filling we have asymmetry, with zero-filling we have ringing. In the first case it is difficult to recognize that the signal is truncated, because it appears much larger than it actually is.
Up to this point I can explain everything. It's all familiar to me. There is another effect that I can't explain at all and appears when I observe the whole spectral range. The baseline of the normal spectrum is wavy.
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This spectrum was acquired on a recent Jeol 400 MHz instrument. I wonder if the digital filter has anything to do with the latter effect.
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