text: Thermal mixing is an energy exchange phenomenon between the electron spin ensemble and the nuclear spin, which can be thought of as using multiple electron spins to provide hyper-nuclear polarization. Note that the electron spin ensemble acts as a whole because of stronger inter-electron interactions. The strong interactions lead to a homogeneously broadened EPR lineshape of the involved paramagnetic species. The linewidth is optimized for polarization transfer from electrons to nuclei, when it is close to the nuclear Larmor frequency. The optimization is related to an embedded three-spin (electron-electron-nucleus) process that mutually flips the coupled three spins under the energy conservation (mainly) of the Zeeman interactions. Due to the inhomogeneous component of the associated EPR lineshape, the DNP enhancement by this mechanism also scales as B.