ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

NMR crystallography

Okay kiddo, so have you heard of magnets before? They can attract certain metals like iron, right? Well, there's this thing called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) that uses magnets to study the tiny particles that make up materials.

When we talk about crystallography, it means we're looking at the arrangement of atoms in a crystal. You know how we can arrange lego blocks to make a bigger structure? That's kind of what happens with atoms in a crystal.

Now, imagine we have a crystal that we want to study. We put it in a really strong magnet and zap it with some energy. The atoms in the crystal start to move around and behave differently because of the magnet.

By looking at how the atoms move and interact with each other, NMR can tell us how the crystal is put together. We can think of it like looking at a puzzle and figuring out how all the pieces fit together.

This can be really useful for all sorts of things like understanding how drugs work or designing new materials. And that's NMR crystallography in a nutshell, kiddo!