Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A sensitivity analysis of the remote detection NMR technique is presented. With remote detection, information about a sample is encoded onto a mobile sensor fluid, which facilitates a spatial separation of encoding and detection of spin magnetization. This approach can be interpreted as a two-dimensional NMR experiment, therefore the same general formalism can be used for a sensitivity analysis. Even though remote detection is a point-by-point experiment, the sensitivity does not scale unfavorably with the number of detected points compared to transient detection. It is proportional to the relative sensitivity between the remote detector and the circuit that is used for encoding. The influence of the different signal decay times is analyzed, and the distinction between spectroscopy and imaging experiments is made.