Chapter One - NMR Crystallography

Abstract

During the past decade, NMR crystallography has emerged as a complementary strategy to the usual diffraction techniques for structure determination. Solid-state NMR (ss-NMR) has indeed proved its efficiency, when combined with diffraction data and possibly molecular modelling, for providing the average structure of compounds. As ss-NMR is not restricted to boundary conditions, further insights into parts of crystals that are not necessarily periodic, like distribution of atoms or groups of atoms with similar electron density, local disorder, mobility, etc., can also be obtained. This combined approach has found many applications for a wide range of materials; some of the most recent examples for extended inorganic solids and molecular compounds are reported in this review, highlighting the potential of this approach for a broad variety of research fields from drugs to material science.