Our Warwick colleagues are starting to make state-of-the art, and scientifically, useful 187GHz
DNP-enhanced NMR measurements on materials such as
Bacteriorhodopsin
which acts as a Proton pump in Archaea,
(Note the number of scans and graph scaling to see the full benefit of the technique)
as well as simpler molecules such as
Urea
and
Glycine
The EPSEC funded Spectrometer make full use of use of the frequency independence of our
transmission optics - incuding the Quasi-Optical feed structure to feed the mm-wave signal
down the bore of a Doty Magic Angle Spinning probe
The Spectrometer - design to work at a Gyrotron's second harmonic around 400 GHz - is giving
significant enhancements (60 in the case of Urea) at half the frequency (187 GHz)
More details of the optics can be found here
February 2011