A device is presented for efficiently enriching parahydrogen by pulsed injection of ambient hydrogen gas. Hydrogen input to the generator is pulsed at high pressure to a catalyst chamber making thermal contact with the cold head of a closed cycle cryostat maintained between 15 and 20 K. The system enables fast production (0.9 standard liters per minute) and allows for a wide range of production targets. Production rates can be systematically adjusted by varying the actuation sequence of high-pressure solenoid valves, which are controlled via an open source microcontroller to sample all combinations between fast and thorough enrichment by varying duration of hydrogen contact in the catalyst chamber. The entire enrichment cycle from optimization to quantification and storage kinetics are also described. Conversion of the para spin-isomer to orthohydrogen in borosilicate tubes was measured at 8 minute intervals over a period of 64 hours with a 12 Tesla NMR spectrometer. These relaxation curves were then used to extract initial enrichment by exploiting the known equilibrium (relaxed) distribution of spin isomers with linear least squares fitting to a single exponential decay curve with an estimated error less than or equal to 1 %. This procedure is time-consuming, but requires only one sample pressurized to atmosphere. Given that tedious matching to external references are unnecessary with this procedure, we find it to be useful for periodic inspection of generator performance. The equipment and procedures offer a variation in generator design that eliminate the need to meter flow while enabling access to increased rates of production. These tools for enriching and quantifying parahydrogen have been in steady use for 3 years and should be helpful as a template or as reference material for building and operating a parahydrogen production facility.

Applications of parahydrogen induced polarization (PHIP) often warrant conversion of the chemically-synthesized singlet-state spin order into net heteronuclear magnetization. In order to obtain optimal yields from the overall hyperpolarization process, catalytic hydrogenation must be tightly synchronized to subsequent radiofrequency (RF) transformations of spin order. Commercial NMR consoles are designed to synchronize applied waves on multiple channels and consequently are well-suited as controllers for these types of hyperpolarization experiments that require tight coordination of RF and non-RF events. Described here is a PHIP instrument interfaced to a portable NMR console operating with a static field electromagnet in the milliTesla regime. In addition to providing comprehensive control over chemistry and RF events, this setup condenses the PHIP protocol into a pulse-program that in turn can be readily shared in the manner of traditional pulse sequences. In this device, a TTL multiplexer was constructed to convert spectrometer TTL outputs into 24 VDC signals. These signals then activated solenoid valves to control chemical shuttling and reactivity in PHIP experiments. Consolidating these steps in a pulse-programming environment speeded calibration and improved quality assurance by enabling the B0/B1 fields to be tuned based on the direct acquisition of thermally polarized and hyperpolarized NMR signals. Performance was tested on the parahydrogen addition product of 2-hydroxyethyl propionate-1-13C-d3, where the 13C polarization was estimated to be P13C = 20 ± 2.5 % corresponding to 13C signal enhancement approximately 25 million-fold at 9.1 mT or approximately 77,000-fold 13C enhancement at 3 T with respect to thermally induced polarization at room temperature.

Applications of PASADENA in biomedicine are continuing to emerge due to recent demonstrations that hyperpolarized metabolic substrates and the corresponding reaction products persist sufficiently long to be detected in vivo. Biomedical applications of PASADENA typically differ from their basic science counterparts in that the polarization endowed by addition of parahydrogen is usually transferred from nascent protons to coupled storage nuclei for subsequent detection on a higher field imaging instrument. These pre-imaging preparations usually take place at low field, but commercial spectrometers capable of heteronuclear pulsed NMR at frequencies in the range of 100 kHz to 1 MHz are scarce though, in comparison to single channel consoles in that field regime. Reported here is a probe circuit that can be used in conjunction with a phase and amplitude modulation scheme we have developed called PANORAMIC (Precession And Nutation for Observing Rotations At Multiple Intervals about the Carrier), that expands a single channel console capability to double or generally multiple resonance with minimal hardware modifications. The demands of this application are geared towards uniform preparation, and since the hyperpolarized molecules are being detected externally at high field, detection sensitivity is secondary to applied field uniformity over a large reaction volume to accommodate heterogeneous chemistry of gas molecules at a liquid interface. The probe circuit was therefore configured with a large (40 mL) Helmholtz sample coil for uniformity, and double-tuned to the Larmor precession frequencies of 13C/1H (128/510 kHz) within a custom solenoidal electromagnet at a static field of 12 mT. Traditional (on-resonant) as well as PANORAMIC NMR signals with signal to noise ratios of approximately 75 have been routinely acquired with this probe and spectrometer setup from 1024 repetitions on the high frequency channel. The proton excitation pulse width was 240 μs at 6.31 W, compared to a carbon-13 pulse width of 220 μs at 2.51 W. When PANORAMIC refocusing waveforms were transmitted at a carrier frequency of 319 kHz, integrated signal intensities from a spin-echo sequence at both proton (510 kHz) and carbon-13 (128 kHz) frequencies were within experimental error to block pulse analogs transmitted on resonance. We anticipate that this probe circuit design could be extended to higher and lower frequencies, and that when used in conjunction with PANORAMIC phase and amplitude modulated arrays, will enable low field imaging consoles to serve as multinuclear consoles.

We present a microstrip photonic bandgap (PBG) device with a switchable plasma element integrated into the patterned ground plane. A pulsed laser plasma is generated in one of the PBG cavity structures creating a medium having an effective negative permittivity in the 8–10 GHz frequency range due to the high plasma density ne = 1017 cm−3. The PBG structure consists of a linear array of seven cavities along the length of the microstrip manufactured by removing cylindrical portions of copper in the ground plane. The plasma is produced in the central cavity of the PBG array and recombines over times of several microseconds allowing for the characterization of the microstrip transmission over a range of plasma density. The results confirm a switchable transmission due to plasma interactions with the electromagnetic field within the PBG structure.

The application of low magnetic fields to heteronuclear NMR has expanded recently alongside the emergence of methods for achieving near unity polarization of spin ensembles, independent of magnetic field strength. The parahydrogen induced hyperpolarization methods in particular, often use a hybrid arrangement where a high field spectrometer is used to detect or image polarized molecules that have been conjured on a separate, dedicated polarizer instrument operating at fields in the mT regime where yields are higher. For controlling polarizer chemistry, spare TTL channels of portable NMR spectrometers can be used to pulse program reaction timings in synchrony with heteronuclear RF transformations. The use of a spectrometer as a portable polarizer control module has the advantage of allowing detection in situ, simplifying the process of optimizing polarization yields prior to in vivo experimental trials. Suitable heteronuclear spectrometers compatible with this application are becoming more common, but are still sparsely available in comparison to a large existing infrastructure of single channel NMR consoles. To determine if one of these single channel spectrometers could be used for heteronuclear NMR, the feasibility of rotating a pair of heteronuclear spins (13C and 1H) at 12 mT was investigated in this study. Nonlinear phase and amplitude modulated waveforms designed to simultaneously refocus magnetization at 128 kHz (13C) and 510 kHz (1H) were generated numerically with optimal control. Although precise quantitative comparisons were not attempted due to limitations of the experimental setup, signals refocused at heteronuclear frequencies with this PANORAMIC approach (Precession And Nutation for Observing Rotation At Multiple Intervals about the Carrier) yielded amplitudes comparable to signals which were refocused using traditional block pulses on heteronuclear channels. Using this PANORAMIC approach to heteronuclear NMR at low field would reduce expense as well as hardware complexity and bulk, weighed against the caveat that elaborate pulses are required. More work will be necessary to test this method on the targeted application of parahydrogen induced hyperpolarization as well as to quantify efficiency, but upon further development we anticipate that this method may offer a viable ‘software’ approach to heteronuclear manipulations of spins at low magnetic fields.