Nuclear magnetic resonance could be made practical with no magnets!

Washington, May 19 (ANI): Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is one of the principal tools in the chemist's arsenal, used to study everything from alcohols to proteins to such frontiers as quantum computing.

However, getting rid of the big, expensive magnets needed for conventional NMR has been a major challenge.

Once it is achieved, you can make NMR portable and reduce the costs, including the operating costs.

It sounds like magic, but now two groups of scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have shown that chemical analysis with NMR is practical without using any magnets at all.

Dmitry Budker of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division and Alex Pines, of the Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UCB's Department of Chemistry have together extended the reach of NMR by eliminating the use of magnetic fields at different stages of NMR measurements, and have finally done away with external magnetic fields entirely.

The hope is to be able to do chemical analyses in the field - underwater, down drill holes, up in balloons - and maybe even medical diagnoses, far from well-equipped medical centers. (ANI)