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Techniques in catalysis

PASADENA NMR

Nature Catalysis volume 5, pages 848–849 (2022)Cite this article

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Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a phenomenon at the heart of very important tools in analytical chemistry and medical diagnostics. Thirty-five years ago, Clifford Russell Bowers and Daniel Weitekamp developed the PASADENA experiment — an ingenious chemical scheme that boosts sensitivity of proton NMR by three orders of magnitude, widening the applicability of NMR altogether.

One of the biggest challenges in the application of magnetic resonance techniques like NMR spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is their low sensitivity at ambient temperature. The main reason for this low sensitivity is the small polarization; that is, the relative population difference of the nuclear spin states in thermal equilibrium. Typical values are on the order of about Peq ≈ 10–5 at the common magnetic field strengths of a few Teslas for a state-of-the-art NMR or MRI machine at ambient temperatures. This means that only a very small fraction of the molecules in a sample contributes to the magnetic resonance (MR) signal, whilst the vast majority are MR silent, as they don’t create a net signal. In order to achieve thermal polarizations on the order of unity, it is necessary to cool down the samples to milli-Kelvin temperatures.

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Fig. 1: Scheme of the PASADENA experiment by Bowers and Weitekamp.

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  1. Eduard-Zintl-Institut für Anorganische und Physikalische Chemie, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Gerd Buntkowsky & Torsten Gutmann

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  1. Gerd Buntkowsky
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  2. Torsten Gutmann
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Correspondence to Gerd Buntkowsky.

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Buntkowsky, G., Gutmann, T. PASADENA NMR. Nat Catal 5, 848–849 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-022-00859-3

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