A Design for a Home-Built Solid State NMR Spectrometer

Since the first commercial NMR spectrometer came out in 1953 from Varian, much of the hardware development has been improved and matured through commercial equipments. Many of magnetic resonance laboratories however still build and use home-built spectrometers, which are satisfactory even with the consideration of educational purpose only. The home-built NMR spectrometer could be further advantageous and could be often an only option for investigating new ideas with demanding experimental conditions or new hardware support. A solid state NMR spectrometer was designed with extra interest in stochastic experiment and built for an 8.93 T superconducting magnet from Oxford instrument. Super-heterodyned system was implemented for the transmitter and receiver parts. Intermediate frequency (IF) for the heterodyne system was chosen to 70 MHz for the first and the second channels, with additional 120 MHz for the third channel for maximum NMR frequency capability. We will show overall schematics, and discuss the designs with detailed diagrams, then demonstrate the applicability of home-built spectrometer with stochastic-excitation in solid state NMR and in applications to quadrupolar nuclear Spins.