Diamonds May Be the Key to Future NMR/MRI Technologies

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Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have demonstrated that diamonds may hold the key to the future for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies.

In a study led by Alexander Pines, a senior faculty scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Glenn T. Seaborg Professor of Chemistry, researchers recorded the first bulk room-temperature NMR hyperpolarization ​of carbon-13 nuclei in diamond in situ at arbitrary magnetic fields and crystal orientations. The signal of the hyperpolarized carbon-13 spins showed an enhancement of NMR/MRI signal sensitivity by many orders of magnitude above what is ordinarily possible with conventional NMR/MRI magnets at room temperature. Furthermore, this hyperpolarization was achieved with microwaves, rather than relying on precise magnetic fields for hyperpolarization transfer.

Pines is the corresponding author of a paper in Nature Communications describing this study. The paper is titled “Room-temperature in situ nuclear spin hyperpolarization from optically pumped nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond.”

The authors report the observation of a bulk nuclear spin polarization of six-percent, which is an NMR signal enhancement of approximately 170,000 times over thermal equilibrium. The signal of the hyperpolarized spins was detected in situ with a standard NMR probe without the need for sample shuttling or precise crystal orientation. The authors believe this new hyperpolarization technique should enable orders of magnitude sensitivity enhancement for NMR studies of solids and liquids under ambient conditions.

“Our results in this study represent an NMR signal enhancement equivalent to that achieved in the pioneering experiments of Lucio Frydman and coworkers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, but using microwave-induced dynamic nuclear hyperpolarization in diamonds without the need for precise control over magnetic field and crystal alignment,” Pines says. “Room-temperature hyperpolarized diamonds open the possibility of NMR/MRI polarization transfer to arbitrary samples from an inert, non-toxic and easily separated source, a long sought-after goal of contemporary NMR/MRI technologies.”

“These results are an important contribution that adds to a growing arsenal of tools being developed by experts throughout the world, including leading laboratories in the US, Europe, Japan and Israel, for creating a more sensitive NMR/MRI signature at easily attainable conditions,” says Frydman, a professor of chemistry at thes Weizmann Institute of Science. which is located in Israel,  near Tel Aviv.  “Achieving this could open up a plethora of applications in physics, chemistry and biology.”

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