Designing broadband pulsed dynamic nuclear polarization sequences in static solids

Abstract

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is an NMR hyperpolarization technique that mediates polarization transfer from highly polarized unpaired electrons to NMR-active nuclei via microwave (mw) irradiation. The ability to generate arbitrarily shaped mw pulses using arbitrary waveform generators opens up the opportunity to remarkably improve the robustness and versatility of DNP, in many ways resembling the early stages of pulsed NMR. We present here novel design principles based on single-spin vector effective Hamiltonian theory to develop new broadband DNP pulse sequences, namely an adiabatic XiX-DNP experiment and a broadband amplitude modulated signal enhanced (BASE) experiment. We demonstrate that the adiabatic BASE pulse sequence may achieve a DNP 1 H enhancement factor of ∼ 360, a record that outperforms all previously known pulsed DNP sequences at ∼ 0.35 T and 80 K in static solids. The bandwidth of the BASE-DNP experiments is about 3 times the 1 H Larmor frequency (∼50 MHz).