An NMR Experiment Based on Off-the-Shelf Digital Data-Acquisition Equipment

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) poses significant challenges for teaching in the context of an undergraduate laboratory, foremost because of high equipment cost. Current off-the-shelf data-acquisition hardware, however, is sufficiently powerful to constitute the core of a fully digital NMR spectrometer operating at the earth's field. We present an NMR experiment that we have developed on this basis for an upper-division laboratory in physical chemistry. Students utilize a spectrometer that is controlled by a program written in LabView to explore the fundamentals of NMR alongside modern techniques of digital data acquisition. An advantage of this approach is that all of the hardware and software components used in the experiment are transparent to the user, which fosters inquiry-based discovery of materials beyond the basic experiments described in the student manual. © 2010 The American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.