As I’m sure the readers of this blog know, NMR spectroscopy is used widely across all branches of chemistry due to its powerful structure elucidation capabilities and the inherently quantitative nature of the technique. Organic relies primarily on 1H/13C experiments where as inorganic chemistry can expand to other nuclei, like 31P and 11B. However, there are many other applications for NMR other than just structural elucidation. Perhaps a lesser known application of NMR spectroscopy, is its ability to determine the isotopic ratio of elements! In this blog post I would like to demonstrate a novel method to determine the 10B/11B isotopic ratio using our NMReady-60e and 1H NMR spectra!

Due to the presence of unpaired d electrons in their metal ions, many transition metal complexes are paramagnetic. The unpaired electrons have a magnetic dipole moment due to their spin and act like tiny magnets, resulting in a small net attraction to an externally applied magnetic field. Unsurprisingly, the presence of paramagnetic ions has significant effects on both the chemical shift and lineshape of the 1H NMR spectrum of transition metal complexes, with the chemical shift range being much wider along with broadening of the signals.

As I’m sure the readers of this blog know, NMR spectroscopy is used widely across all branches of chemistry due to its powerful structure elucidation capabilities and the inherently quantitative nature of the technique. Organic relies primarily on 1H/13C experiments where as inorganic chemistry can expand to other nuclei, like 31P and 11B. However, there are many other applications for NMR other than just structural elucidation. Perhaps a lesser known application of NMR spectroscopy, is its ability to determine the isotopic ratio of elements! In this blog post I would like to demonstrate a novel method to determine the 10B/11B isotopic ratio using our NMReady-60e and 1H NMR spectra!