Designing broadband pulsed dynamic nuclear polarization sequences in static solids #DNPNMR

Published: Wednesday, 14 December 2022 - 10:00 -0400

Author: Thorsten Maly

Wili, Nino, Anders Bodholt Nielsen, Laura Alicia Völker, Lukas Schreder, Niels Chr. Nielsen, Gunnar Jeschke, and Kong Ooi Tan. “Designing Broadband Pulsed Dynamic Nuclear Polarization Sequences in Static Solids.” Science Advances 8, no. 28 (July 15, 2022): eabq0536.

https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq0536.

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) hyperpolarization technique that mediates polarization transfer from unpaired electrons with large thermal polarization to NMR-active nuclei via microwave (mw) irradiation. The ability to generate arbitrarily shaped mw pulses using arbitrary waveform generators allows for remarkable improvement of the robustness and versatility of DNP. We present here novel design principles based on single-spin vector effective Hamiltonian theory to develop new broadband DNP pulse sequences, namely, an adiabatic version of XiX (X–inverse X)–DNP and a broadband excitation by amplitude modulation (BEAM)–DNP experiment. We demonstrate that the adiabatic BEAM-DNP pulse sequence may achieve a 1H enhancement factor of ∼360, which is better than ramped-amplitude NOVEL (nuclear spin orientation via electron spin locking) at ∼0.35 T and 80 K in static solids doped with trityl radicals. In addition, the bandwidth of the BEAM-DNP experiments (~50 MHz) is about three times the 1H Larmor frequency. The generality of our theoretical approach will be helpful in the development of new pulsed DNP sequences. A powerful generalized theoretical framework to design efficient broadband pulsed DNP sequences at low fields is presented.