Aerial view of campus with Williamsport, the Susquehanna River and Bald Eagle Mountain as a backdrop

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

NMR

Vanessa Richter operating the Bruker Avance 300 NMR spectrometer. She is taking a proton spectrum of a metallocarborane she synthesized in our Summer Research Program.

The technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is based on the interaction of the magnetic properties of nuclei with the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our NMR spectrometer is a state of the art piece of instrumention (Bruker Avance 300), capable of observing many different nuclei. This $175,000 instrument was obtained in 1999 with the help of a National Science Foundation grant. It is also capable of 2-dimensional techniques and is equipped with a z-gradient generator. Many of our investigative experiments require that students unravel the structure of an unknown molecule. NMR spectroscopy is at the center of most strategies for solving structural problems in all fields of chemistry.