Polarised light gives a new view of NMR

A new way of conducting nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) that could have a significant impact on its use in fundamental research and its practical applications has been reported in Nature.

NMR is an important tool for analysing the structures of molecules, but if it is desired to know about the positions of atoms in space—to make a compositional map or to determine the structure of a molecule—it is generally necessary to modify the experiments in complex ways. Mike Romalis at Princeton University and colleagues have developed a new way of capturing the information, by looking at the way the nuclear magnetic fields affect polarised light. Thanks to the Faraday effect, the plane of polarised light can be rotated by a magnetic field. The researchers have now shown that this effect can be used to measure an NMR signal by shining a polarised laser beam through a liquid sample and observing how much the polarisation is rotated as it passes through. This technique, which the team has demonstrated for liquid xenon and for water, allows the NMR measurement to be made at a spatial scale limited only by the size of the spot into which the laser can be focused. doi: 10.1038/nature05088

Pittcon award recipients

A number of awards will be made at Pittcon 2007 (25 February to 2 March, Chicago, IL, USA). Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award: Robert M. Corn (University of California at Irvine); Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award: Jonathan V. Sweedler (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign); Pittsburgh Heritage Award: David Schwartz (Bio-Rad Laboratories); Maurice F. Hasler Award: D. Bruce Chase (DuPont); Charles N. Reilley Award: George S. Wilson (University of Kansas); Tomas Hirschfeld Award: Gerard M. Downey (Ashtown Food Research Centre, Dublin); Williams–Wright Award: Michael Carraba (Hach Homeland Security Technologies). More information on these awards can be found at www.pittcon.org/technical/awards.html

Raman provides continuous monitoring of radioactive waste

An improved monitoring system for providing continuous analysis of high-level radioactive waste has been developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers and was presented at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The system uses on-line Raman spectroscopy and is capable of simultaneously and continuously quantifying the levels of all the chemically-significant anions within the waste, such as nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, carbonate, chromate, hydroxide, sulphate and aluminate.

The system can be adapted to monitor in a variety of harsh environments and can be tailored for a variety of complex mixtures, such as pulp and paper processing liquids, electroplating solutions, as well as radioactive tank wastes.