3

Obviously most of the nmr radiation would get blocked by the sea of electrons, but

  1. there is still the skin effect where radiation gets in exponentially and could in theory interact with nuclei
  2. the range of the nmr spectrometer is short anyways

and if so, has this been done in the past? I tried googling it but i keep coming across solid-state nmr and metal ion nmr, which is not nmr on a solid metal.

Qmechanic
  • 220,844
user1402154
  • 227

1 Answers1

5

Yes - it is e.g. possible to do $^{27}$Al NMR of aluminium metal. See this paper.

However, you would likely encounter problems with ferromagnetic metals like iron due to the huge magnetic fields applied to the sample. There are methods which do not use such fields (like zero-field NMR or the related NQR), but I am not sure whether these have been applied to metals.

EDIT: In fact, you can get quite a lot of information from the NMR of Fe, Co and Ni. See this paper for an example.

Additionally, the Knight shift can be used to study the adsorption of molecules on metals.

FusRoDah
  • 1,219