Investigation of Transverse Instability of a High-Current Relativistic Electron Beam in a Linear Induction Accelerator

Abstract

The article presents the results of studies on the transverse instability of a high-current relativistic electron beam developing in a linear induction accelerator LIA for 5 MeV electron energy, which is created at the BINP SB RAS together with RFNC VNIITF. These results were obtained using a software package that makes it possible to simulate the dynamics of the instability development, as well as to calculate the increment of this instability averaged over the accelerator length. The package consists of four main parts. The first of them, made on the base of a three-dimensional model of the accelerating module electrodynamic system of the LIA, allows calculating the main characteristics of electromagnetic dipole modes of such a module, the second and third parts are designed to find three-dimensional accelerating electric and focusing magnetic fields, respectively. In the last part of the package, a system of ordinary differential equations is solved that describes both the motion of beam macroparticles in electric and magnetic fields, including the eigenmode fields, and the excitation of the mode fields by the electron beam. The adequacy of the physical models used in the software package was tested by comparing the spectra of field oscillations in the accelerator modules obtained in calculations and recorded in the experiment. On the base of the data obtained, the main regularities of the transverse beam instability development in the frequency range ∆f = 0.3–1.1 GHz were revealed, and possible methods for suppressing this instability in the LIA were proposed.