The role of electron polarization on nuclear spin diffusion

Abstract

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is capable of boosting signals in nuclear magnetic resonance by orders of magnitude by creating out-of-equilibrium nuclear spin polarization. The diffusion of nuclear spin polarization in the vicinity of paramagnetic dopants is a crucial step for DNP and remains yet not well understood. In this Letter, we show that the polarization of the electron spin controls the rate of proton spin diffusion in a DNP sample at 1.2 K and 7 T; at increasingly high electron polarization, spin diffusion vanishes. We rationalize our results using a 2 nucleus - 1 electron model and Lindblad s Master equation, which generalizes preexisting models in the literature and qualitatively accounts for the experimental observed spin diffusion dynamics.

Main text: 6 pages, 3 figures Supplement: 9 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Dynamic nuclear polarization and spin-diffusion in non-conducting solids
• Dynamic nuclear polarization as kinetically constrained diffusion
• Optically pumped spin polarization as a probe of many-body thermalization

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Simulation and design of shaped pulses beyond the piecewise-constant approximation
• Controlled synthesis and characterization of porous silicon nanoparticles for dynamic nuclear polarization