Advances in ex-situ Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance has revolutionized modern science by its precision, selectivity and non-envasiveness. From complicated biomolecules to materials, from living organisms to nanometric particles, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy have provided a wealth of invaluable information. Those studies take place in the laboratory, since they require strong and extremely homogeneous superconducting magnets and this represents a major limitation for the technique. Furthermore, the size of the object or subject to study is limited since it has to fit inside the bore of the magnet. Efforts to alleviate those problems lead to the recent development of portable magnetic resonance systems. Their use remained, however, mainly qualitative, since spectroscopic information could not be recovered. We have introduced recently an approach to regain this lost spectral information even in the presence of inhomogeneous magnetic fields. Our approach is based on the matching between the effect of the radio-frequency field and the effect of the static magnetic field. Several practical implementations will be reviewed and put in perspective for their applicability and efficiency in ex-situ NMR. (C) 2004 Academie des sciences. Published by Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.