ABCs of FT-NMR

The primary purpose of this book is to help you understand what is going on in Fourier Transform (FT) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Modern life is now very largely life with “black boxes” that carry warning labels: “No user-serviceable parts inside.”  Many find black boxes to be quite acceptable, at least as long as they work.  But how willing should we be to accept black-box analyses without some understanding of how those analyses were obtained?  NMR spectrometers are like “black boxes” in that they offer many standardized procedures, but it can be dangerous to the quality of your data if you rely slavishly on such procedures without understanding how and why the proper parameter choices are critical. The scope of this book is broad rather than deep with the intention of providing helpful insight. Much can be understood in a more qualitative way and that is the approach taken here.  For those few areas where a quantitative approach is needed, simple mathematics will usually suffice.

This book has been used as a text for “Basic FT-NMR Spectroscopy” at the California Institute of Technology for the last ten years.