Research

The main axes of our research are the following:

1. Development of new methods in solid-state NMR

A particular emphasis is put on the development of new and the improvement of existing polarization-transfer and decoupling techniques. We are also interested in the refinement of the theoretical concepts for the description of spin systems under time-dependent Hamiltonians (Floquet theory) as well as numerical simulations using the spin-simulation package Gamma.

2. Hardware and Instrumentation  

This includes modification of solid-state NMR probes to extend the measurement capabilities. Moreover, we have a working dissolution DNP setup in order to wide the scope of this DNP techniques especially in the fields of in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), as well as solid-state NMR.

3. Theoretical Description of Spin Diffusion

Spin diffusion is the transport of polarization between localized spins. It plays an important role for dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), where polarization is transferred from unpaired electrons to nuclear spins in order to enhance NMR sensitivity. Spin diffusion is crucial for the efficiency of DNP because it determines how fast the locally injected polarization is distributed to the bulk. Describing this microscopically is notoriously difficult because of the large number of spins involved. We are developing an efficient approach to this problem by using a dynamical mean-field approach.