Polymer Microstructure: The Conformational Connection to NMR

Of the nuclei (¹H and ¹³C), which both possess nuclear spin and are common to synthetic polymers, ¹³C is by far the more sensitive NMR spin probe of polymer microstructure. ¹³C NMR spectra suffer neither from a narrow dispersion of chemical shifts nor from extensive homonuclear, scalar spin-spin coupling, which both complicate the analyses of ¹H NMR spectra. It is the sensitivity of ¹³C resonance frequencies or chemical shifts, δ¹³C, to the micro structures of polymers, which makes ¹³C NMR so useful as a structural probe.