Highly efficient superradiant oscillator with front-extraction output in TE11 mode operating at low magnetic field

Abstract

With a low guiding magnetic field, a highly efficient X-band coaxial superradiant relativistic backward wave oscillator (SR-RBWO) with a front-extraction cavity and a built-in mode converter is proposed in this paper. The coaxial structure is used to reduce the guiding magnetic field of the intense relativistic electron beam. To decrease the transmission loss of microwave power in the slow wave structure (SWS), a front-extraction cavity is introduced. The inner conductor of the coaxial SWS is hollowed out as the output waveguide, and then, the microwave is extracted by the front-extraction cavity and enters the hollow waveguide rather than re-enter the SWS to output. With this improvement, the power conversion factor K can be increased by 0.44 even more. Making use of the feature of longer SWSs of SR-RBWOs, a built-in mode converter is designed, which can convert the circular TM01 mode propagating in the output waveguide into the circular TE11 radiation mode that can be radiated into free space directly. Therefore, the length of the radiation system can be reduced significantly, which is beneficial to the miniaturization of the entire high-power microwave system. Particle-in-cell simulation demonstrates that with a diode voltage of 180 kV and a guiding magnetic field of 0.37 T, the output SR pulse with an average power of 1.00 GW corresponding to power conversion factor K = 1.8 can be obtained.