Automatic Tuning and Matching for NMR Probes Based on Physics-Informed Conditional Neural Processes

The NMR resonator is the sensor responsible for transmitting RF pulses and receiving detection signals, and its tuning and matching are crucial to acquiring high-sensitivity NMR signals. Automated tuning and matching (ATM) is therefore essential for rapid, accurate, and continuously efficient testing. Existing NMR ATM methods still primarily rely on iterative search strategies, whose dominant cost arises from repeated hardware measurements and waiting periods, often requiring multiple measurement cycles before convergence. The emergence of in situ NMR detection of high-concentration ionic samples has further increased the demand for real-time, rapid ATM with a large dynamic range, posing a major challenge to conventional approaches. This paper proposes a physics-informed few-shot learning method for automatic tuning and matching over wideband and multi-resonance-frequency NMR scenarios. The tuning-and-matching problem is formulated as a structure and frequency-conditioned function regression task, and a conditional neural process (CNP) is introduced to learn cross-task priors and directly predict the states of tunable components from only a small number of real-machine context measurements. A physics regularizer based on the local sensitivity of the input impedance is further designed to impose stronger penalties on errors under high-Q narrowband operating conditions without relying on proprietary analytical circuit models. Simulation studies and real NMR experiments are conducted on multiple circuit topologies and multiple target frequencies using only a small number of NMR samples. The results demonstrate consistent improvements in key metrics, including accuracy of tuning and matching and the number of collected real-machine samples required per task. In particular, with only 100 sampled tuning/matching capacitor points and 20 on-hardware collected samples, the proposed method already delivers satisfactory tuning-and-matching performance. The method achieves an attractive accuracy–cost tradeoff across both cross-topology and cross-frequency scenarios, and shows strong potential for few-shot, rapid, real-time detection.