A NEW ULTRA LOW-FIELD ESR SPECTROMETER

A CW electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrometer working at earth-field is described for the first time. The optimized sensitivity has allowed to reduce the size of the sample holder down to 100 mm3, a low value for such a low working frequency (1.845 MHz). At this frequency, only narrow ESR signals are significant (maximum sweep 125-mu-T or 100 A/m). The use of the Bloch configuration and the particular care to optimize the sensitivity lead to a design that partially compensates the lack of sensitivity due to low fields. Small material quantities are thus usable. Moreover, the spectrometer is low cost, portable, and easily reproducible with the announced performance. The main use of the spectrometer is to characterize materials for earth field magnetometry. For that purpose it has been necessary to define a figure of merit for magnetometry. Until this study, the only parameter discussed was the linewidth of the homogeneous ESR line (i.e., T2). The detailed discussion of the figure of merit, taking into account not only the material but the couple spectrometer material, considerably decreases the predominance of the linewidth and let emerge secondary factors such as packaging, susceptibility, ESR lineshape, T1 vs T2, etc. The figure of merit evaluated from the material parameters has been experimentally measured for different pi radicals. Comparison with their performance in earth field magnetometry demonstrates the pertinence of the proposed figure of merit.