This article is about microresonators for EPR Spectroscopy.
Abhyankar, Nandita, Amit Agrawal, Pragya Shrestha, Russell Maier, Robert D. McMichael, Jason Campbell, and Veronika Szalai. “Scalable Microresonators for Room-Temperature Detection of Electron Spin Resonance from Dilute, Sub-Nanoliter Volume Solids.” Science Advances 6, no. 44 (October 2020): eabb0620
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb0620
We report a microresonator platform that allows room temperature detection of electron spins in volumes on the order of 100 pl, and demonstrate its utility to study low levels of dopants in perovskite oxides. We exploit the toroidal moment in a planar anapole, using a single unit of an anapole metamaterial architecture to produce a microwave resonance exhibiting a spatially confined magnetic field hotspot and simultaneously high quality-factor (Q-factor). To demonstrate the broad implementability of this design and its scalability to higher frequencies, we deploy the microresonators in a commercial electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer operating at 10 GHz and a NIST-built EPR spectrometer operating at 35 GHz. We report continuous-wave (CW) EPR spectra for various samples, including a dilute Mn2+-doped perovskite oxide, CaTiO3, and a transition metal complex, CuCl2 * 2H2O. The anapole microresonator presented here is expected to enable multifrequency EPR characterization of dopants and defects in perovskite oxide microcrystals and other volume-limited materials of technological importance.