Towards high performance dielectric microwave resonators for X-band EPR spectroscopy

Microwave (MW) resonators in Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectroscopy concentrate the MW magnetic field (B₁) at the sample and separate the MW electric field from the sample. There are numerous experimental methods in EPR spectroscopy which all impose different requirements on MW resonators (e.g. high or low quality factor, MW conversion, and B₁-field homogeneity). Although commercial spectrometers offer standardized MW resonators for a broad application range, newly emerging and highly-specialized research fields push these spectrometers to or beyond their sensitivity limits. Optimizing the MW resonator offers one direct approach to improve the sensitivity. Here we present three low-cost optimization approaches for a commercially available X-band (9-10 GHz) MW resonator for three experimental purposes (continuous-wave (CW), transient and pulse EPR). We obtain enhanced MW conversion factors for all three optimized resonators and higher quality factors for two optimized resonators. The latter is important for CW and transient EPR. Furthermore, we fabricated a resonator which features an extended area of homogeneous B₁-field and, hence, improved pulse EPR performance. Our results demonstrate that small changes to a commercial MW resonator can enhance its performance in general or for specific applications.