Structure Determination and Refinement of Paramagnetic Materials by Solid-State NMR

Paramagnetism in solid-state materials has long been considered an additional challenge for structural investigations by using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (ssNMR). The strong interactions between unpaired electrons and the surrounding atomic nuclei, on the one hand, are complex to describe, and on the other hand can cause fast decaying signals and extremely broad resonances. However, significant progress has been made over the recent years in developing both theoretical models to understand and calculate the frequency shifts due to paramagnetism and also more sophisticated experimental protocols for obtaining high-resolution ssNMR spectra. While the field is continuously moving forward, to date, the combination of state-of-the-art numerical and experimental techniques enables us to obtain high-quality data for a variety of systems. This involves the determination of several ssNMR parameters that represent different contributions to the frequency shift in paramagnetic solids. These contributions encode structural information on the studied material on various length scales, ranging from crystal morphologies, to the mid- and long-range order, down to the local atomic bonding environment. In this perspective, the different ssNMR parameters characteristic for paramagnetic materials are discussed with a focus on their interpretation in terms of structure. This includes a summary of studies that have explored the information content of these ssNMR parameters, mostly to complement experimental data from other methods, e.g., X-ray diffraction. The presented overview aims to demonstrate how far ssNMR has hitherto been able to determine and refine the structures of materials and to discuss where it currently falls short of its full potential. We attempt to highlight how much further ssNMR can be pushed to determine and refine structure to deliver a comprehensive structural characterization of paramagnetic materials comparable to what is to date achieved by the combined effort of electron microscopy, diffraction, and spectroscopy.