A triple resonance (e, 1H, 13C) probehead for liquid-state DNP experiments at 9.4 Tesla #DNPNMR #Instrumnentation

Published: Friday, 13 May 2022 - 10:00 -0400

Author: Thorsten Maly

Denysenkov, Vasyl, Danhua Dai, and Thomas F. Prisner. “A Triple Resonance (e, 1H, 13C) Probehead for Liquid-State DNP Experiments at 9.4 Tesla.” Journal of Magnetic Resonance 337 (April 2022): 107185.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmr.2022.107185.

In DNP experiments, NMR signal intensity is increased by transferring the much larger electron spin polarization to nuclear spins via microwave irradiation. Here we describe the design and performance of a probehead that makes it possible to perform Overhauser DNP experiments at 1H and 13C in liquid samples with a volume of up to 100 nl. We demonstrate on a 13C-labeled sodium pyruvate sample in water that proton decoupling under DNP conditions is possible with this new triple-resonance DNP probehead. In addition, the heat dissipation from the sample has been greatly improved with our new probe design. This makes it possible to keep liquid samples at a constant temperature under irradiation with a high-frequency 263 GHz microwave gyrotron with a few watts of output power. This improved performance opens up the possibility to disentangle the role of sample temperature and applied microwave power for DNP efficiency in liquids and to obtain a quantitative determination of EPR saturation by observing the suppression of paramagnetic shift as a function of microwave power.