Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), a scientific technique associated with outsized, very low-temperature, superconducting magnets, is one of the principal tools in the chemist’s arsenal, used to study everything from alcohols to proteins to such frontiers as quantum computing. In hospitals the machinery of NMR’s cousin, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is as loud as it is big, but nevertheless a mainstay of diagnosis for a wide range of medical conditions. It sounds like magic, but now two groups of scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, one expert in chemistry and the other in atomic physics, long working together as a multidisciplinary team, have shown that chemical analysis with NMR is practical without using any magnets at all.
