Pines, again!
The group of Alex Pines has recently published on PNAS a very interesting paper entitled “Remote detection of nuclear magnetic resonance with an anisotropic magnetoresistive sensor” (F. Verpillat, M. P. Ledbetter, S. Xu, D. J. Michalak, C. Hilty, L.-S. Bouchard, S. Antonijevic, D. Budker, and A. Pines).
In this paper they report the detection of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) using an anisotropic magnetoresistive (AMR) sensor. A “remote-detection” arrangement was used in which protons in flowing water were prepolarized in the field of a superconducting NMR magnet, adiabatically inverted, and subsequently detected with an AMR sensor situated downstream from the magnet and the adiabatic inverter. AMR sensing is well suited for NMR detection in microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” applications because the sensors are small, typically on the order of 10 µm.
