This project involves the implementation of a high temperature superconducting probe for microscopy at 9.4 T. Two separate probes will be developed simultaneously, one with a warm bore diameter of 5 mm and one with a 10 mm diameter. Both probes are the result of a collaboration with Conductus Inc. of Sunnyvale, and are on permanent loan to Duke for the purpose of technical development. Areas of focus for this development include implementing a pre-amplifier and T/R switch compatible with the low system noise figure, improving B1 homogeneity through balanced tuning and specialized pulse sequence design, and characterization of the RF linearity of each probe. The end goal of the development phase is to produce a probe which has substantially enhanced SNR performance and a field of view compatible with imaging of biological specimens of interest such as mouse embryos and the hippocampus of the rat.
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