Quasioptical hardware for a flexible FIR-EPR spectrometer

In this paper we present and summarize recent accomplishments of the Freed High Field Electron Paramagnetic Resonance group. In particular, we discuss the application of quasioptical design techniques to instrumentation problems in the far-infrared. We stress that there is no "universal spectrometer" or "universal resonator". Rather, we demonstrate with a variety of examples from the liquid and solid state that the spectrometer configuration and the resonator used should be optimized for the experiment at hand in order to achieve the ultimate in sensitivity. Quasioptical techniques and methods of analysis offer a unified framework to analyze the expected performance of a proposed spectrometer design, as well as suggest the important control parameters for optimizing the sensitivity of a given experiment as we show in the text. The flexibility of quasioptical methods will also be demonstrated with a variety of resonator designs and sample configurations.