Principles and progress in ultrafast multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance

Multidimensional acquisitions play a central role in the progress and applications of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Such experiments have been collected traditionally as an array of one-dimensional scans, with suitably incremented delay parameters that encode along independent temporal domains the nD spectral distribution being sought. During the past few years, an ultrafast approach to nD NMR has been introduced that is capable of delivering any type of multidimensional spectrum in a single transient. This method operates by departing from the canonical nD NMR scheme and by replacing its temporal encoding with a series of spatial manipulations derived from magnetic resonance imaging. The present survey introduces the main principles of this subsecond approach to spectroscopy, focusing on the applications that have hitherto been demonstrated for single-scan two-dimensional NMR in different areas of chemistry.