Nuclear Overhauser effect sensitivity enhancement

Determination of magnetically equivalent sensitive nuclei which are scalar coupled to an insensitive, non-abundant nucleus like Dc or 15N, extended spin echo sequences for signal enhancement by nuclear Overhauser effect (APT, SEMUT) or polarization transfer (DEPT, INEPT, etc). 

The NMR signals of insensitive nuclear spins can be enhanced by transferring polarization from a more sensitive species to which they are coupled. The well-known pulse sequences as the polarization transfer techniques are insensitive nuclei enhanced by polarization transfer (INEPT), distortionless enhancement by polarization transfer (DEPT), and reverse insensitive nuclei enhanced by polarization transfer (RINEPT) The INEPT sequence is an alternative to the nuclear Overhauser effect. The INEPT experiment does not require any particular relaxation mechanism and therefore a better enhancement factor can be obtained. Furthermore it is demonstrated that INEPT sequence can be used to determine the multiplicity of each signal in a NMR spectrum. More recently, the INEPT and DEPT experiments were used for the coherence transfer via heteronuclear J-coupling between spin-1/2 and quadrupolar nuclei in the solids. " Fyfe et showed that coherence transfer via the scalar coupling between spin-1/2 and quadrupolar nuclei can be obtained in the solid state by using INEPT experiment. 

The 13C NMR sensitivity can sometimes be a problem, but for the kind of samples studied here the effective concentration of monomer units is several molar which does not place excessive demands on present Fourier transform NMR spectrometers. In addition to the sensitivity of the chemical shift to structure (9), the relaxation of protonated carbons is dominated by dipole-dipole interaction with the attached proton (9). The dependence of the relaxation parameters T, or spin-lattice, and Tor spin-spin, on isotropic motional correlation time for a C-H unit is shown schematically in Figure 1. The T1 can be determined by standard pulse techniques (9), while the linewidth at half-height is often related to the T2. Another parameter which is related to the correlation time is the nuclear Overhauser enhancement factor, q. The value of this factor for 13C coupled to protons, varies from about 2 at short correlation times to 0.1 at long correlation... 

Key Words Dynamic nuclear polarization, DNP, Overhauser effect, Hyperpolarization, Sensitivity enhancement,... 

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