Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) has recently emerged as a key method to increase the sensitivity of solid-state NMR spectroscopy under Magic Angle Spinning (MAS). While efficient binitroxide polarizing agents such as AMUPol have been developed for MAS DNP NMR at magnetic fields up to 9.4 T, their performance drops rapidly at higher fields due to the unfavorable field dependence of the cross-effect (CE) mechanism and AMUPol-like radicals were so far disregarded in the context of the development of polarizing agents for very high-field DNP. Here, we introduce a new family of water-soluble binitroxides, dubbed TinyPols, which have a three-bond non-conjugated flexible amine linker allowing sizable couplings between the two unpaired electrons. We show that this adjustment of the linker is crucial and leads to unexpectedly high DNP enhancement factors at 18.8 T and 21.1 T: an improvement of about a factor 2 compared to AMUPol is reported for spinning frequencies ranging from 5 to 40 kHz, with ε_H of up to 90 at 18.8 T and 38 at 21.1 T for the best radical in this series, which are the highest MAS DNP enhancements measured so far in aqueous solutions at these magnetic fields. This work not only breathes a new momentum into the design of binitroxides tailored towards high magnetic fields, but also is expected to push the application frontiers of high-resolution DNP MAS NMR, as demonstrated here on a hybrid mesostructured silica material.

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) has recently emerged as a tool to enhance the sensitivity of solid-state NMR experiments. However, so far high enhancements (>100) are limited to relatively low magnetic fields, and DNP at fields higher than 9.4 T significantly drops in efficiency. Here we report solid-state Overhauser effect DNP enhancements of over 100 at 18.8 T. This is achieved through the unexpected discovery that enhancements increase rapidly with increasing magic angle spinning (MAS) rates. The measurements are made using 1,3-bisdiphenylene-2-phenylallyl dissolved in o-terphenyl at 40 kHz MAS. We introduce a source–sink diffusion model for polarization transfer which is capable of explaining the experimental observations. The advantage of this approach is demonstrated on mesoporous alumina with the acquisition of well-resolved DNP surface-enhanced ²⁷Al cross-polarization spectra.