Konstantin Ivanov Intercontinental Magnetic Resonance Seminar

Konstantin Ivanov intercontinental magnetic resonance seminar series started on April 8, 2020. It organises seminars on a range of topics in magnetic resonance covering NMR, EPR, hyperpolarisation, colour centres and optical pumping, and ZULF NMR. The emphasis of the talks are on both methods and applications and a perspective on the future of the field. The speakers include a wide range of scientists ranging from PhD students to post-doctoral fellows, to senior scientists.

Upcoming Talks:

• November 6, 2026, Matthias Ernst, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, "Spin diffusion in NMR",  Polarization transfer in NMR based on homonuclear dipolar couplings is often referred to as spin diffusion. This term was coined by Bloembergen in 1949 observing too fast relaxation in samples with paramagnetic relaxation sinks.The observed polarization decay was attributed to the spatial transport of magnetization towards the paramagnetic centers which can be described by a diffusion equation. Today the term spin diffusion is often used in a broader sense describing polarization transfer by the flip-flop term of the homonuclear dipolar coupling and often the distinction between spatial and spectral spin diffusion is made. In reality however, the two types of spin diffusion appear often at the same time. In my talk, I will combine a more educational overview of spin diffusion combined with recent results from our research. I will discuss methods to theoretically describe spin diffusion including our recently published approach based on spin dynamic mean-field theory (spinDMFT) that allows for the first time the calculation of static spectral spin diffusion based on first principles. Despite the fact that the spin-diffusion polarization transfer is a many-body problem and can often be described very well by a rate equation, there are a number of experiments that clearly demonstrate the coherent time evolution underlying the spin-diffusion process through the formation of echoes.

• November 13, 2026, Vipin Agarwal, TIFR Hyderabad, India

• November 20, 2026, Irene Ceccolini, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

• November 27, 2026, David Bryce, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada

• December 4, 2027, Gregory Tricot, University of Lille, France

• December 11, 2026, Kshama Sharma, CNRS Lyon, France

• December 18, 2026,  Hannah Busch, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

• December 25, 2026-January 8, 2027, No seminars, Winter break.

• January 15, 2027, Leonardo Le, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany 

• January 22, 2027, Nino Wili, ETH Zurich, Switzerland