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Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) allows measuring enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals. Though the efficiency of DNP has been known to increase at low fields, the usefulness of DNP has not been throughly investigated yet. Here, using a superconducting quantum interference device-based NMR system, we performed a series of DNP experiments with a nitroxide radical and measured DNP spectra at several magnetic fields down to sub-microtesla. In the DNP spectra, the large overlap of two peaks having opposite signs results in net enhancement factors, which are significantly lower than theoretical expectations [30] and nearly invariant with respect to magnetic fields below the Earth’s field. The numerical analysis based on the radical’s Hamiltonian provides qualitative explanations of such features. The net enhancement factor reached 325 at maximum experimentally, but our analysis reveals that the local enhancement factor at the center of the rf coil is 575, which is unaffected by detection schemes. We conclude that DNP in the hyperfine-field-dominant region yields sufficiently enhanced NMR signals at magnetic fields above 1 μ T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopy is one of the most significant applications of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Here, we demonstrate that the 2D NMR can be performed even at a low magnetic field of less than 5 μT, which is ten times less than the Earth’s magnetic field. The pulses used in the experiment were composed of circularly polarized fields for coherent as well as wideband excitations. Since the excitation band covers the entire spectral range, the simplest two-pulse sequence delivered the full 2D spectrum. At 5 μT, methanol with 13 C enriched up to 99% belongs to a strongly coupled regime, and thus its 2D spectrum exhibits complicated spectral correlations, which can be exploited as a fingerprint in chemical analysis. In addition, we show that, with compressive sensing, the acquisition of the 2D spectrum can be accelerated to take only 45% of the overall duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] A pulse of circular polarization can rapidly and precisely drive nuclear spins, even in the regime beyond the rotating wave approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]