ESR imaging of pyrolytic carbon films

Since electron spin resonance (ESR) is a sensitive tool for the characterisation of microstructures of pyrolytic carbon, we applied spatially resolved ESR for detecting the homogeneity of the gas phase reactions required for chemical vapour deposition and to monitor resulting pyrolytic carbon coatings in a non-destructive way. The filtered back-projection variant of continuous-wave ESR imaging was used to achieve three-dimensional images of the ESR signal intensity with a voxel size of (60 mum)(3).