Microstructural geometry revealed by NMR line shape analysis

Abstract

We introduce a technique for extracting microstructural geometry from NMR line shape analysis in porous materials at angstrom-scale resolution with the use of weak magnetic field gradients. Diverging from the generally held view of FID signals undergoing simple exponential decay, we show that a detailed analysis of the line shape can unravel structural geometry on much smaller scales than previously thought. While the original q-space PFG NMR relies on strong magnetic field gradients in order to achieve high spatial resolution, our current approach reaches comparable or higher resolution using much weaker gradients. As a model system, we simulated gas diffusion for xenon confined within carbon nanotubes over a range of temperatures and nanotube diameters in order to unveil manifestations of confinement in the diffusion behavior. We report a multiscale scheme that couples the above-mentioned MD simulations with the generalized Langevin equation to estimate the transport properties of interest for this problem, such as diffusivity coefficients and NMR line shapes, using the Green–Kubo correlation function to correctly evaluate time-dependent diffusion. Our results highlight how NMR methodologies can be adapted as effective means toward structural investigation at very small scales when dealing with complicated geometries. This method is expected to find applications in materials science, catalysis, biomedicine, and other areas.