We are glad to have Prof. Rainer Kimmich, from the University of Ulm in Germany, to tell us his personal reminiscence of the early days of Field-Cycling development.

       Prof. Kimmich has joined the development of the field-cycling technique since his early time of Ph.D. under Prof. Noack. Despite of hardware development, he also has concluded displacement of polymer dynamics for material analysis by conducting field-cycling NMR. He is not only a passioned researcher but also a generous lecturer for those students who are interested in field-cycling NMR. His book, "NMR - Tomography, Diffusometry, Relaxometry" becomes an important "tool book" in field-cycling NMR field. This book introduces molecular motions, even imagings etc. in clear and concrete mathematics basis.
       We are appreciated to have those pioneers who work on methology development so that we can have such wonderful tools to make our application studies. His story about field-cycling NMR development will bring us to the time when this field-cyclng technique was born.

When people who are interested in molecular dynamics start investigations based on field-cycling NMR techniques they can nowadays employ mature, well designed and versatile systems that are commercially available. They can just focus on the samples of their research interest and rely on the hard- and soft-ware offered for such studies. Sixty years back, in the sixties of the last century, tedious and time-consuming preparations often for years were required before any relaxometry data point could be recorded. Anyway, at that time it was clear that it would be most promising to exploit the field/frequency dependence of relaxation times or rates for the characterization of molecular dynamics: There was high motivation to take efforts to try relaxation dispersion experiments. ...

NMR - Tomography, Diffusometry, Relaxometry
Author: Rainer Kimmich, published by Springer
      Tomography, diffusometry and relaxometry are fields based on common physical principles. The combined use of such techniques provides synergistic insight into physicochemical material properties of an object. The difficulty which newcomers to the field face is to practice and to apply theoretical formalisms from different sources while still learning the principles of NMR and while being already engaged in NMR research. So the author's ambition is a treatise that offers easy and quick access for the reader to any implied matter of interest. He has exerted himself to facilitate the comprehension of NMR principles by extensive cross-referencing among the sections and chapters.

Field-cycling NMR Relaxometry: Instrumentation, Model Theories and Applications
Editor: Rainer Kimmich
       Field-cycling NMR relaxometry is evolving into a methodology of widespread interest with recent technological developments resulting in powerful and versatile commercial instruments. Polymers, liquid crystals, biomaterials, porous media, tissue, cement and many other materials of practical importance can be studied using this technique.
This book summarises the expertise of leading scientists in the area and the editor is well placed, after four decades of working in this field, to ensure a broad ranging and high quality title. Starting with an overview of the basic principles of the technique and the scope of its use, the content then develops to look at theory, instrumentation, practical limitations and applications in different systems.
Newcomers to the field will find this book invaluable for successful use of the technique. Researchers already in academic and industrial settings, interested in molecular dynamics and magnetic resonance, will discover an important addition to the literature.