While big machines were once the stuff that scientific dreams are made of, analytical spectroscopy instrumentation has trended to smaller products that are portable, affordable, and fit into locations far removed from a standard laboratory, such as the back of an ambulance or inside a chemical reactor. “We are starting to follow that trend with NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance),” says Daniel Kennedy, a PhD candidate at the University of California (UC) Berkeley who works in the research group of Alexander Pines, a senior faculty scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division, and UC Berkeley’s Glenn T. Seaborg Professor of Chemistry. Shrinking the hardware to get away from multi-million dollar facilities is not the only issue with which Kennedy and Vikram Bajaj, a principal investigator in Alex Pines’ Berkeley Lab NMR group, are concerned. While NMR is a leading technology for “teasing out components of a chemical mixture” and determining the structure of proteins at atomic resolution, it nonetheless struggles with signal strength and signal-to-noise ratio. To these ends, Bajaj and Kennedy, along with Scott Seltzer, Hattie Ring at Berkeley Lab and colleagues at Boulder’s National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed a technology by which hyperpolarized xenon gas (129Xe)
The post Producing Hyperpolarized Xenon Gas on a Microfluidic Chip has been published on Technology Org.
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