Signal demodulation
In practice the signal deduced in the previous section is not visualised as it is, but instead the NMR or MRI instrument eliminates the frequency offset $\omega_0$ by demodulating the signal. It is done by multiplying the signal with harmonics of frequency
that is close to the Larmor frequency
. That is,
. In this way a complex signal is created: the real part will be when the sign is multiplied with
, and the imaginary part arises as the multiplication of the signal and
.
The real part of the demodulated signal (often called as the "real channel") will be:
(1)
After the multiplication the part with frequency
is removed with a lowpass filter, and the remaining low-frequency term forms the real channel of the signal.
(2)
The imaginary channel is quite similar. After the multiplication with
and the lowpass filtering:
(3)
So the detected signal managed as complex is:
(4)