People

Pinenuts

For his research at Berkeley, Alex Pines insists that credit goes to the self-dubbed "Pinenuts," the students and postdocs who have come through his lab over 50 years, many of whom continue to flourish as leaders in academia, industry, and government.

Pines and the Pinenuts are known for multiple quantum spectroscopy, wherein groups of nuclear spins flip while absorbing groups of radiofrequency quanta. These concepts and methods are used in an array of areas, including quantum information processing, a growing area of research that brings together quantum mechanics and information theory. Pines and his dynamic team have repeatedly reframed assumptions about the essential behavior of the molecules that govern our world. Their ongoing contributions to solid state NMR include expanding the reach of the technology to analyze molecules that have nuclei that were previously considered not suitable for NMR analysis. Using simultaneous rotation of a given sample around two axes in space, the Pines group took a novel approach that enables imaging by emulating the symmetry of a geometric solid described by Plato, the icosahedron. Pines and his group also invented zero-field NMR — that is NMR without a magnet, which initially sounded very far-fetched, but is now an exciting methodology being deployed in areas from analytical chemistry and to fundamental atomic physics. While their approaches in zero-field and solid state NMR were initially met by the magnetic resonance community with skepticism, Pines and the Pinenuts have repeatedly proved successful at turning seemingly impossible ideas into viable experiments.