Carbon fiber-based cathodes for magnetically insulated transmission line oscillator operation

Abstract

We report experimental results of carbon fiber cathodes for the magnetically insulated transmission line oscillator (MILO). The fabrication process of carbon fiber cathodes is presented. In experiments employing a 500kV, 100ns high-voltage pulsed accelerator, microwave generation in the C band was obtained with ∼900MW peak power and ∼20ns pulse width at about 4.5% efficiency. The MILO operation exhibited high stability by using carbon fiber cathodes. These results show that carbon fiber cathodes can offer promising applications for high performance MILOs.