Improved sensitivity for W-band Gd(III)-Gd(III) and nitroxide-nitroxide DEER measurements with shaped pulses.

Chirp and shaped pulses have been recently shown to be highly advantageous for improving sensitivity in DEER (double electron-electron resonance, also called PELDOR) measurements due to their large excitation bandwidth. The implementation of such pulses for pulse EPR has become feasible due to the availability of arbitrary waveform generators (AWG) with high sampling rates to support pulse shaping for pulses with tens of nanoseconds duration. Here we present a setup for obtaining chirp pulses on our home-built W-band (95GHz) spectrometer and demonstrate its performance on Gd(III)-Gd(III) and nitroxide-nitroxide DEER measurements.

A Dynamic Nuclear Polarization spectrometer at 95 GHz/144 MHz with EPR and NMR excitation and detection capabilities.

A spectrometer specifically designed for systematic studies of the spin dynamics underlying Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) in solids at low temperatures is described. The spectrometer functions as a fully operational NMR spectrometer (144 MHz) and pulse EPR spectrometer (95 GHz) with a microwave (MW) power of up to 300 mW at the sample position, generating a MW B(1) field as high as 800 KHz. The combined NMR/EPR probe comprises of an open-structure horn-reflector configuration that functions as a low Q EPR cavity and an RF coil that can accommodate a 30-50 μl sample tube.

A capacitively coupled temperature-jump arrangement for high-resolution biomolecular NMR.

A simple design for performing rapid temperature jumps within a high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) setting is presented and exemplified. The design is based on mounting, around a conventional NMR glass tube, an inductive radiofrequency (RF) irradiation coil that is suitably tuned by a resonant circuit and is driven by one of the NMR's console high-power RF amplifiers. The electric fields generated by this coil's thin metal strips can lead to a fast and efficient heating of the sample, amounting to temperature jumps of ≈ 20 °C in well within a second-particularly in the presence of lossy dielectric media like those provided by physiological buffers.