ABSTRACT
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a
powerful method of elucidating the structure and dynamics
of a wide range of materials. Most NMR analyses are
conducted on condensed phases, such as organic, organome-
tallic, and biological molecules in solution, as well as
solid-state materials such as glasses and polymers. The
capabilities of NMR have been extended constantly over
the past 60 years, and it has become one of the most power-
ful and widely used spectroscopic techniques available.
NMR spectroscopy was first developed by the research
groups of Bloch and Purcell in the 1940s (Bloch, 1946;
Purcell, 1946). This work was recognized by the 1952
Nobel Prize in Physics. The initial chemical applications
of NMR were to 1H and 19F nuclei in solution, and it soon
became apparent that the highly resolved spectra of
organic molecules could be used to determine chemical
structure (Arnold et al., 1951; Dickenson, 1950). New devel-
opments in theory and experiment also followed quickly,
starting with Hahn’s work on spin echoes (Kaplan and
Hahn, 1957), the advent of double-resonance experiments
(Emshwiller et al., 1960; Hartmann and Hahn, 1962), and
magic angle spinning (MAS) for solid-state samples
(Andrew et al., 1959; Lowe, 1959). Sensitivity was the
major limitation of NMR at the start of the 1960s, with the
only available instrumentation being of the continuous-wave
(CW) variety. The development of Fourier transform
(FT)-NMR using pulsed excitation, first studied by Lowe
