Portable NMR Sensor unveiled

US security experts may soon be getting a valuable new tool for identifying the chemical constituents in suspicious substances. A portable device makes it possible for the first time ever to take high-resolution NMR spectroscopy - one of the principal tools for chemical analysis - out of the laboratory and into the field for use on samples of any size.

This portable NMR sensor was developed by a collaboration of researchers with the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of California at Berkeley and the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Macromolecular Chemistry in Aachen, Germany.

“Our device does not compete with the superconducting magnets that are used to study proteins, but there are many applications, besides homeland security, where you can’t bring samples from the field to the laboratory, including medical diagnosis, archaeological analysis, or the exploration of objects in space, like planets or moons,” said chemical engineering graduate student Vasiliki Demas, one of the co-authors of a Science journal paper describing the portable NMR device.