Surface-to-volume ratio with oscillating gradients

Abstract

Restrictions to diffusion result in the dispersion of the bulk diffusion coefficient. We derive the exact universal high-frequency behavior of the diffusion coefficient in terms of the surface-to-volume ratio of the restrictions. This frequency dependence can be applied to quantify structure of complex samples with NMR using oscillating field gradients and static-gradient CPMG. We also demonstrate the inter-relations between different equivalent diffusion metrics, and describe how to calculate the effect of restrictions for arbitrary gradient waveforms.