Isidor Isaac Rabi takes the credit as the man who discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. He rightfully won a Nobel Prize in Physics in the year of 1944. However, it did not end there. Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell took the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance further and illustrated their results in 1946. They were also awarded a Nobel Prize for their contribution in the year 1952.

Workflow can seriously slow to a snail’s pace, or stop completely in the worst of cases, if you rely on outsourcing analytical data. Others have their own workflow and list of duties for the day and are not exactly beholden to your timescale. However, if you take out the middleman, say, purchasing your own nuclear magnetic resonance, or alternatively known by its acronym NMR or a benchtop spectrometer, you can streamline your workflow for more peak performance, rather than grind your work to a halt. If you do not invest in one, maybe you should take drumming lessons because you will be doing a lot of finger drumming until your data gets back to you.

Benchtop NMRs are typically used by chemists and are arguably the most useful and powerful tools in a chemists modern day toolbox; very few tools match NMR in the analytical department. Their primary job is the studying of various molecules that reside in our reality. This extends to observing the type, number and the collection of components in any given molecule, and by extension, observable nuclei. Hydrogen nuclei, for example, is the number one top dog studied in observable nuclei.

So you are looking for an NMR spectrometer but which will do the job? High-field? Or Low-field? It depends on the job at hand. It is best to judge the use of an NMR by the strength of the magnetic field. High field NMRs typically have 1 Tesla or more. On the other hand, low field NMRs are typically lower, or at, 0.5 Tesla.

To put Teslas into perspective, 100 Tesla is nearly equal to 2 million times the Earth’s own magnetic field. Which means when the Los Alamos National Laboratory team created the strongest non-destructive magnet field in 2012, at 100.75 Tesla, there is a reason they set a new world record. It equates to 100 times stronger than a junkyard magnet and 30 times stronger than a medical MRI scan.