Searching for matter’s inner truth

One of the most fundamental ways humans perceive the world is through visualizing their surroundings. Light bounces off an object, enters the eye and sends a signal to the brain, which then converts that light into an image. ​“It’s how you learn about the world,” said John Muntean. ​“You’re basically doing spectroscopy.” Spectroscopy is the study of how light and other forms of radiation interact with matter. Discoveries in the field of spectroscopy range from uncovering new elements to revealing the existence of distant galaxies.

Muntean, who manages the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, developed a fascination with spectroscopy nearly four decades ago. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1985, Muntean returned to his home in the suburbs of Chicago, eager to find a summer research opportunity. He reached out to Leon Stock, a chemistry professor at the University of Chicago, who asked Muntean if he was interested in doing spectroscopy at Argonne. ​“They had a unique facility with a solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer,” he said.

“Hundreds of people have come through my lab and I always tell them that part of my goal is to make sure they become an expert.” — John Muntean, Argonne National Laboratory. 

Muntean jumped at the opportunity and spent the following months learning about the spectrometer and observing changes in solids, liquids and gases when they were exposed to different types of radiation in very high magnetic fields. ​“The Earth’s magnetic field is about 200,000 times weaker than what we use for this spectrometer at Argonne,” Muntean said. ​“Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy allows us to extend our perceptual modes into this region that we did not evolve senses to detect, similar to how an MRI allows us to see inside the human body.”

The experience led Muntean to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry at UChicago, where he continued working with Argonne. After earning his degree in 1990, Muntean began managing Argonne’s Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, a responsibility he still holds today. Because Muntean isn’t part of a particular research group, he helps scientists across disciplines on various projects. ​“Anybody who is interested in magnetic resonance or has a spectroscopy problem they can’t solve comes to me for help,” he said. ​“It’s one of the true strengths of Argonne — we have multidisciplinary teams of experts in all fields that can assemble and disassemble according to whatever the research project needs.”

Since 1990, Muntean has worked on projects to improve battery storage, build better catalysts and reveal the atomic structure of biological samples. In 2002, he left Argonne to work in industry for two years before becoming a teacher of organic chemistry at a small college. In 2008, Muntean returned to Argonne part-time to resume his role with the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory. Now, he supports experiments that involve nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and oversees instrument maintenance. ​“These instruments need lots of love and attention, and when they go down, it’s not necessarily intuitively obvious what to do,” he said.

Muntean also plays a critical role in training postdoctoral researchers and staff members on not only how to use the spectrometers, but also the theory and history of the field. ​“Hundreds of people have come through my lab and I always tell them that part of my goal is to make sure they become an expert who understands how the instrument works.”

One perk of returning to Argonne part-time was that it left room for Muntean to rekindle his passion for art. Muntean is an award-winning artist who uses wood, stainless steel and even Legos to create elaborate sculptures that transform when they are illuminated and rotated. For instance, one of his first sculptures looks like an abstract three-dimensional shape, but when you shine a light through it, you see a shadow of a horse. If you rotate it 120 degrees, you see the shadow of an elephant. And if you rotate it again, you see a shadow of a coyote. ​“I love how representational my sculptures are of how science operates. It’s exactly what we’re doing with spectroscopy,” Muntean said. ​“We shine light on matter to reveal some inner truth.”