Magic-angle spinning solid-state multinuclear NMR on low-field instrumentation

Mobile and cost-effective NMR spectroscopy exploiting low-field permanent magnets is a field of tremendous development with obvious applications for arrayed large scale analysis, field work, and industrial screening. So far such demonstrations have concentrated on relaxation measurements and lately high-resolution liquid-state NMR applications. With high-resolution solid-state NMR spectroscopy being increasingly important in a broad variety of applications, we here introduce low-field magic-angle spinning (MAS) solid-state multinuclear NMR based on a commercial ACT 0.45 T 62 mm bore Halbach magnet along with a homebuilt FPGA digital NMR console, amplifiers, and a modified standard 45 mm wide MAS probe for 7 mm rotors. To illustrate the performance of the instrument and address cases where the low magnetic field may offer complementarity to high-field NMR experiments, we demonstrate applications for Na-23 MAS NMR with enhanced second-order quadrupolar coupling effects and P-31 MAS NMR where reduced influence from chemical shift anisotropy at low field may facilitate determination of heteronuclear dipole-dipole couplings. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.