VCO-based ESR-on-a-chip as a tool for low-cost, high-sensitivity food quality control

When the MOUSE leaves the house

“…1a, bottom). The measurement principle followed to acquire depth profiles is the same as that employed for logging oil wells except that the NMR-MOUSE sensor is horizontally moved between consecutive measurements in steps on the order of 0.1 mm instead of acquiring NMR signal while the well-logging tool is moving laterally with respect to the magnet surface for distances on the order of meters (Coates et al, 1999;Hürlimann and Heaton, 2016). Today, the NMR-MOUSE for high-resolution depth profiling is a heritage product of Magritek GmbH with its production site in Aachen, which is managed by the two NMR-MOUSE pioneers Federico Casanova and Juan Perlo.…”

“…The NMR-MOUSE was introduced to the cultural heritage community through the effort of Annalaura Segre at the turn of the millennium (Segre and Blümich, 2002), and from 1999 to 2019 its further refinement has benefitted greatly from the cultural heritage projects EUREKA-Eurocare !2212-MOUSE, EU-ARTECH, CHARISMA, and IPERION-CH. With the exception of well-logging relaxometry (Coates et al, 1999), it is common practice to conduct NMR measurements in a laboratory. But objects of cultural heritage often cannot leave the museum or are immobilized, e.g., at excavation sites, so the NMR-MOUSE has to be moved to the site and operated under the prevailing environmental and climatic conditions.…”

“…Commercial tabletop NMR instruments employ compact transmit-receive electronics (Blümich et al, 2014;Blümich, 2016;Blümich and Singh, 2018), which, although reliable, are nevertheless too large and power-hungry for mobile use. Their state of the art has been surpassed by the development of smaller, single-chip-based magnetic resonance transceivers (Zalesskiy et al, 2014;Ha et al, 2014Ha et al, , 2015Grisi et al, 2015;Chu et al, 2017;Anders et al, 2017). In particular, a small monolithic spectrometer has been developed (Bürkle et al, 2020), which uses a high-voltage CMOS processer with supply voltages up to 25 V for enhanced driving strength to combine the monolithic NMR-on-a-chip approach with macroscopic, centimeter-sized coils.…”

“…Well-logging NMR is also known as inside-out NMR, because the instrument is inserted into the object and not the object into the magnet. Inside-out NMR is mobile but also destructive, as a hole needs to be drilled into the object (Jackson et al, 1980;Coates et al, 1999). The underlying concept of mobile stray-field relaxometry was extended at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, to nondestructive materials testing with NMR relaxometers accessing the object from one side.…”

Reply on RC1

“…Commercial tabletop NMR instruments employ compact transmit-receive electronics (Blümich et al, 2014;Blümich, 2016;Blümich and Singh, 2018), which, although reliable, nevertheless, are too large and power-hungry for mobile use. Their state-of-the-art has been surpassed by the development of smaller, single-chip based magnetic resonance transceivers (Zalesskiy et al, 2014;Ha et al, 2014;Ha et al, 2015;Grisi et al, 2015;Chu et al, 2017;Anders et al, 2017). In particular, a small monolithic spectrometer has been developed (Bürkle et al, 2020), which uses a high-voltage CMOS process with supply voltages up to 25 V for enhanced driving strength to combine the monolithic NMR-on-a-chip approach with macroscopic, cm-sized coils.…”