Solid‐State NMR Spectroscopy: Introduction for Solid‐State Chemists

Abstract

Solid‐state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( ssNMR ) is a powerful and flexible tool for deriving structural and dynamical information for a broad variety of material classes ranging from metals, intermetallics, and ceramics over organic, inorganic, and metal–organic frameworks to molecular crystals and polymers. The combination of relaxation experiments, lineshape analyses, and 2 D exchange techniques spans a dynamical window of about 14 decades with correlation times ranging from 10 −12 s for fast ion conduction and up to 100 s for the relaxation close to the glass transition. ssNMR is element selective and thus able to identify chemical building units and simultaneously probes their homo‐ and heteronuclear through‐bond and through‐space connectivities, orientation correlations, as well as distances up to a few nanometers. Thus, ssNMR is ideally suited and often used to complement diffraction studies and quantum chemical calculations. It does not suffer from a loss of long‐range order and may equally be applied to crystalline, disordered, and amorphous materials to make progress on the structure elucidation of complex compounds. This chapter provides an overview of fundamental aspects of ssNMR , including the most important nuclear spin interactions and their typical spectral lineshapes for both wideline and high‐resolution experiments. Based on this, we describe the development and application of various 1 D and 2 D NMR techniques, for both structural and dynamical aspects, on selected examples taken from the recent literature. In particular, we focus on strengths, weaknesses, and the expressiveness of the individual methods.