Untuned broadband spiral micro-coils achieve sensitive multi-nuclear NMR TX/RX from microfluidic samples

• Main Authors: Davoodi, Hossein, Nordin, Nurdiana, Munakata, Hirokazu, Korvink, Jan G., MacKinnon, Neil, Badilita, Vlad
• Format: Article
• Published: Nature Research 2021
• Subjects: Q Science (General); QD Chemistry
• Online Access: http://eprints.um.edu.my/28518/
• Institution: Universiti Malaya

The low frequency plateau in the frequency response of an untuned micro-resonator permits broadband radio-frequency reception, albeit at the expense of optimal signal-to-noise ratio for a particular nucleus. In this contribution we determine useful figures of merit for broadband microcoils, and thereby explore the parametric design space towards acceptable simultaneous excitation and reception of a microfluidic sample over a wide frequency band ranging from C-13 to H-1, i.e., 125-500 MHz in an 11.74 T magnet. The detector achieves 37% of the performance of a comparably sized, tuned and matched resonator, and a linewidth of 17 ppb using standard magnet shims. The use of broadband detectors circumvents numerous difficulties introduced by multi-resonant RF detector circuits, including sample loading effects on matching, channel isolation, and field distortion.