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Spectroscopy

Clear signals from surfaces

Nature volume 468, pages 381–382 (2010)Cite this article

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Nuclear magnetic resonance is a versatile analytical technique, but acquiring well-resolved NMR spectra of chemical surfaces has been hard. The coming of age of a spectral enhancement method should change all that.

For many decades, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies of surfaces have promised to provide detailed information about reaction mechanisms involving solid catalysts, but many of the results have been limited by the low signal-to-noise ratio of the experiments. With the recent development of advanced dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) techniques to enhance NMR sensitivity, however, this situation has changed dramatically. Reporting in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Lesage et al.1 describe an outstanding example of DNP in which the NMR signals of molecules attached to silica surfaces were enhanced approximately 50-fold. Such an increase in sensitivity could revolutionize NMR studies of surfaces.

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Figure 1: Enhanced NMR signals from surfaces.

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  1. Robert G. Griffin is in the Department of Chemistry and the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. rgg@mit.edu,

    Robert G. Griffin

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Griffin, R. Clear signals from surfaces. Nature 468, 381–382 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/468381a

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