A tutorial on the precessional behaviour of hydrogen nuclei in external magnetic fields

The purpose of this tutorial is to derive the precessional characteristics of the magnetic moments of hydrogen nuclei in the presence of a constant external magnetic field using the Dirac bra-ket formulation of quantum mechanics (QM). This behaviour has many applications, most notably in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Many NMR and MR imaging textbooks claim that the QM expectation value of the magnetic moment of a proton in a magnetic field reduces to the classical picture of a precessing magnetic dipole. This paper validates this conclusion by reducing the cumbersome QM integrals using Dirac notation and matrix algebra, and then comparing this result with the classical picture. It illustrates the connections between the quantum and classical pictures and demonstrates quantitatively how they differ and how they are similar. This tutorial targets students and researchers interested in the fundamental physics behind the MR phenomenon and assumes that the reader has a b...