We present highly robust, optimal control-based shaped pulses designed to
replace all 90{\deg} and 180{\deg} hard pulses in a given pulse sequence for
improved performance. Special attention was devoted to ensuring that the pulses
can be simply substituted in a one-to-one fashion for the original hard pulses
without any additional modification of the existing sequence. The set of four
pulses for each nucleus therefore consists of 90{\deg} and 180{\deg}
point-to-point (PP) and universal rotation (UR) pulses of identical duration.
These 1 ms pulses provide uniform performance over resonance offsets of 20 kHz
(1H) and 35 kHz (13C) and tolerate reasonably large radio frequency (RF)
inhomogeneity/miscalibration of (+/-)15% (1H) and (+/-)10% (13C), making them
especially suitable for NMR of small-to-medium-sized molecules (for which
relaxation effects during the pulse are negligible) at an accessible and widely
utilized spectrometer field strength of 600 MHz. The experimental performance
of conventional hard-pulse sequences is shown to be greatly improved by
incorporating the new pulses, each set referred to as the Fantastic Four
(Fanta4).Comment: 28 pages, 19 figure
