2D-REFINE spectroscopy: Separation of overlapping hyperfine spectra

We show on a mixture of three spectrally overlapping paramagnetic compounds TEMPO, BDPA and CuHis that it is possible to separate their field-swept and hyperfine spectra based on the difference in their longitudinal relaxation times T1. This was achieved in a two-dimensional experiment, where one dimension corresponds to the spectral domain and the second dimension encodes the relaxation behavior of the individual compound. Inverse Laplace Transform with respect to this domain separates the field-swept and hyperfine spectra of the individual compounds in the relaxation rate domain. This extends our formerly proposed Relaxation Filtered Hyperfine (REFINE) method to be applicable to more than two spectrally overlapping spectra by adding a further dimension to the chosen EPR experiment.