Study of electron spectral diffusion process under DNP conditions by ELDOR spectroscopy focusing on the 14N solid effect

Spectral diffusion of electron spin polarization in glasses doped with radicals for DNP

Spectral diffusion of electron spin polarization plays a key part in dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). It determines the distribution of polarization across the electron spin resonance (ESR) line and consequently the polarization that is available for transfer to the nuclear spins. Various authors have studied it experimentally by means of electron-electron double resonance (ELDOR) and proposed and used macroscopic models to interpret these experiments. However, microscopic models predicting the rate of spectral diffusion are scarce. The present article is an attempt to fill this gap. It derives a spectral diffusion equation from first principles and uses Monte Carlo simulations to determine the parameters in this equation. The derivation given here builds on an observation made in a previous article on nuclear dipolar relaxation: spectral diffusion is also spatial diffusion and the random distribution of spins in space limits the former. This can be modelled assuming that rapid flip-flop transitions between a spin and its nearest neighbour do not contribute to diffusion of polarization across the ESR spectrum. The present article presents predictions of the spectral diffusion constant and shows that this limitation may lower the spectral diffusion constant by several orders of magnitude. As a check the constant is determined from first principles for a sample containing 40 mM TEMPOL. Including the limitation then results in a value that is close to that obtained from an analysis of previously reported ELDOR experiments.

Large cross-effect dynamic nuclear polarisation enhancements with kilowatt inverting chirped pulses at 94 GHz

Dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP) is a process that transfers electron spin polarisation to nuclei by applying resonant microwave radiation, and has been widely used to improve the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Here we demonstrate new levels of performance for static cross-effect proton DNP using high peak power chirped inversion pulses at 94 GHz to create a strong polarisation gradient across the inhomogeneously broadened line of the mono-radical 4-amino TEMPO. Enhancements of up to 340 are achieved at an average power of a few hundred mW, with fast build-up times (3 s). Experiments are performed using a home-built wideband kW pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer operating at 94 GHz, integrated with an NMR detection system. Simultaneous DNP and EPR characterisation of other mono-radicals and biradicals, as a function of temperature, leads to additional insights into limiting relaxation mechanisms and give further motivation for the development of wideband pulsed amplifiers for DNP at higher frequencies.

A transition from solid effect to indirect cross effect with broadband microwave irradiation

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) at high magnetic fields has become a prominent technique for signal enhancement in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). In static samples, the highest DNP enhancement is usually observed for high radical concentrations in the range of 15-40 mM. Under these conditions, the dominant DNP mechanism for broad-line radicals is the electron-electron spectral-diffusion-based indirect cross effect (iCE). To further increase the DNP performance, broadband microwave irradiation is often applied. Until now, the theory of iCE was not rigorously combined with broadband microwave irradiation. This paper fills this gap by extending the iCE theory to explicitly include broadband irradiation. We demonstrate that our theory allows for quantitative fitting of the DNP spectra lineshapes using four different datasets acquired at 3.4 T and 7 T. We find that the DNP mechanism changes with an increase in the excitation bandwidth. While with narrowband continuous-wave irradiation the DNP mechanism is a combination of the solid effect (SE) and iCE, it shifts toward iCE with increasing excitation bandwidth until, at high bandwidth, the iCE completely dominates the DNP spectrum - this effect was not accounted for previously.