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Richard R. Ernst
1933–2021 · Switzerland · Born 1900–1939
Nobel Chemistry 1991
Swiss chemist at ETH Zurich who transformed NMR spectroscopy into a high-resolution structural tool.
Nobel-winning work
Ernst replaced slow frequency sweeps with pulse excitation and Fourier transformation in NMR, hugely increasing sensitivity, and then invented two-dimensional NMR to correlate nuclei through bonds and through space. His methods, rewarded by the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, turned NMR into the dominant tool for determining molecular structure and eventually enabled magnetic resonance imaging.
Fields
Related topics
Fluorescence, NMR spectroscopy
Fluorescence reports excited-state emission; NMR reports nuclei in distinct magnetic and chemical environments.
Combining NMR, IR and MS to determine structure
Structure elucidation is strongest when formula, functional groups, fragments, chemical shifts and integrals agree.