Foreword

Abstract

ForewordNuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has been discovered more than fifty five years ago. Since then, its field of application has grown continuously, reaching domains as different as food science, petroleum exploration, medicine or quantum computing. Indeed, NMR can provide valuable information in many domains, since almost all atoms have at least one isotope with a nuclear magnetic moment (non-vanishing nuclear spin), since little energy is involved and since, finally, the coupling between the nuclear spins and the surroundings is sufficiently small to be treated as a perturbation. This explains the capability of NMR to explore the core of matter through local probes at an atomic resolution. Even if magnetic resonance is sensitive to the local environment, NMR spectra still reveal the long range symmetry of the sample, allowing its use for characterizing ordered, disordered or partially ordered systems. It is certainly as an analytical method that NMR has experienced the largest extension (R.R. Ernst, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1991), illustrated nowadays by the presence of spectrometers in almost all chemistry laboratories. Other applications of NMR were recently recognized through Nobel prizes. Firstly, NMR has now been proved to be a real alternative to X-ray crystallography for determining the solution structure of biomolecules such as proteins or DNA fragments, with the key advantage of allowing the exploration of their internal dynamics (K. Wűthrich, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2002). Secondly, NMR has reached hospital world through its non-invasive imaging feature, becoming a very important diagnosis tool in medicine (P.C. Lauterbur and P. Mansfield, Nobel Prize for Medecine 2003).Even if NMR is now used in many fields, the concepts of NMR originate from the physics of condensed matter. The present special issue of the Comptes Rendus Physique mainly focuses on two connected axes of active research in physics: highly polarized nuclear spin systems and dipolar interactions. This issue follows a symposium held 10 March 2003 at CEA/Saclay in the honor of the 70th birthday of Maurice Goldman. This symposium comprised different conferences on fields connected to NMR such as polymers, magnetic resonance imaging or quantum computers.Maurice Goldman has worked for more than forty years in the field of NMR in condensed matter physics and made many important contributions to the two domains presented in this special issue. He was introduced to NMR by Anatole Abragam and became rapidly a specialist in relaxation theory and nuclear magnetism. He was one of the predominant contributors to the creation of spin thermodynamics applied to nuclear magnetic resonance in solids through the spin temperature concept [1]. Then Maurice Goldman played a key-role in the description and observation of the phase transition experienced by highly polarized nuclear spins to ferro-, heli-or antiferromagnetic states, the bilinear interactions between the spins being the dipolar interactions [2]. His achievement in the field of nuclear ma...