Combining microwave beams with high peak power and long pulse duration

Abstract

The beam combining results with a metal dichroic plate illuminated by the S/X band gigawatt level high power microwaves are presented. According to the previous experiments, the microwave breakdown problem becomes obvious when the peak power and the pulse duration increase, thus, several methods for enhancing the power handling capacity have been considered, and the metal dichroic plates are redesigned to handle the S/X band high power microwaves. Then the design, fabrication, and testing procedure are discussed in detail. The further experimental results reveal that, operated on the self-built accelerator Spark-04, the radiated powers from the S and X band sources have reached 1.8 GW with pulse durations of about 80 ns, and both beams have been successfully operated on the selected dichroic plate without microwave breakdown.