Invited Review Article: Instrumentation for nuclear magnetic resonance in zero and ultralow magnetic field

Michael C D Tayler; Thomas Theis; Tobias F Sjolander; John W Blanchard; Arne Kentner; Szymon Pustelny; Alexander Pines; Dmitry Budker

doi:10.1063/1.5003347

Invited Review Article: Instrumentation for nuclear magnetic resonance in zero and ultralow magnetic field

Rev Sci Instrum. 2017 Sep;88(9):091101. doi: 10.1063/1.5003347.

Authors

Michael C D Tayler¹, Thomas Theis², Tobias F Sjolander³, John W Blanchard⁴, Arne Kentner⁵, Szymon Pustelny⁶, Alexander Pines³, Dmitry Budker¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
² Department of Chemistry, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
³ College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
⁴ Helmholtz Institut Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany.
⁵ RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany.
⁶ Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, 30-348 Kraków, Poland.

PMID: 28964224
DOI: 10.1063/1.5003347

Abstract

We review experimental techniques in our laboratory for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in zero and ultralow magnetic field (below 0.1 μT) where detection is based on a low-cost, non-cryogenic, spin-exchange relaxation free ⁸⁷Rb atomic magnetometer. The typical sensitivity is 20-30 fT/Hz^1/2 for signal frequencies below 1 kHz and NMR linewidths range from Hz all the way down to tens of mHz. These features enable precision measurements of chemically informative nuclear spin-spin couplings as well as nuclear spin precession in ultralow magnetic fields.