ABSTRACT
The spin trapping technique involves the addition reaction of a very reactive short-lived free radical with a diamagnetic compound (the spin trap) to produce a relatively long-lived free radical product (the spin adduct) which can be studied by electron spin resonance (ESR). In favorable cases, the resulting ESR spectrum allows the identification of the original reactive radical. Even if no unique assignment is feasible, it is still possible to learn something about the nature of R·, the short-lived free radical, and thus study the chemistry of the free radical of interest. Spin trapping allows one to probe for the presence of free radicals that are much too short-lived (i.e., too reactive) to observe directly because they are not present at a high enough concentration to be detected by the standard ESR spectrometer.
