Measurement of material properties with a tunable resonant cavity

A tunable resonant cavity is used to measure the complex permittivity of dielectrics and the surface conductivity of metals with high precision. The analytical approximations, traditionally used in the cavity perturbation techniques, have been replaced with a rigorous numerical solution of the electromagnetic field distribution inside the rotationally symmetric cavity filled with inhomogeneous dielectrics. The measured values of the unloaded Q factor are compared with the numerically computed values over the tuning range. The least-squares data fitting procedure yields simultaneously the values of the loss tangent and the surface conductivity, and their standard deviations.