2018/10/04 by Dominik B. Bucher, David R. Glenn, Hongkun Park +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #physics.app-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevx.10.021053
published as Phys. Rev. X 10, 021053 (2020)
arxiv created 2018/10/04 · arxiv updated 2020/06/11
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a widely used tool for chemical analysis and molecular structure identification. Because it typically relies on the weak magnetic fields produced by a small thermal nuclear spin polarization, NMR suffers from poor molecule-number sensitivity compared to other analytical techniques. Recently, a new class of NMR sensors based on optically-probed nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum defects in diamond have allowed molecular spectroscopy from sample volumes several orders of magnitude smaller than the most sensitive inductive detectors. To date, however, NV-NMR spectrometers have only been able to observe signals from pure, highly concentrated samples. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a technique that combines picoliter-scale NV-NMR with fully integrated Overhauser dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) to perform high-resolution spectroscopy on a variety of small molecules in dilute solution, with femtomole sensitivity. Our technique advances mass-limited NMR spectroscopy for drug and natural product discovery, catalysis research, and single cell studies.