A Novel Multiple-Quantum Correlation NMR Scheme to Separate Components of a Mixture According to Their Diffusion Coefficients

Abstract

A versatile three-dimensional diffusion-edited nuclear magnetic resonance experiment is described that concatenates a multiple-quantum/single-quantum correlation scheme with a diffusion-ordered pulse sequence. The experiment is demonstrated on mixtures of small molecules with similar diffusion coefficients and is able to resolve severely overlapped signals along the third dimension. The subspectra of individual components of the mixtures are well separated and their diffusion coefficients can hence be extracted with a greater degree of accuracy as compared to the standard two-dimensional diffusion-ordered spectroscopy experiments.