Novel 140 GHz gyro-TWT amplifier

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. We have designed and are currently building a novel gyro-TWT amplifier at powers up to 100 kW at a frequency of 140 GHz. The electron beam will be provided by an existing MIG electron gun which has been previously used in gyrotron oscillator research at the 100 kW power level at 140 GHz. The gun operates at 65 kV and up to 8 A with /spl nu//sub /spl perp////spl nu//sub /spl par// equal to 1.5. The novel wave circuit consists of two facing mirrors with confocal profiles in the transverse direction and flat profiles in the longitudinal direction. The mode is Gaussian-like in the transverse direction. This cavity design effectively reduces the mode competition problem in conventional amplifiers from two dimensions to one dimension. Another advantage of this circuit is the relatively large circuit size, which improves power capacity. Preliminary calculations indicate that the linear gain is about 2.7 dB/cm with an efficiency exceeding 20%. The driver of the gyro-TWT amplifier is a 95 GHz Varian EIO generator with 100 W peak output power. The amplifier also employs a confocal mode converter which launches a Gaussian beam along the axis. The slot size of the cavity is optimized to have minimal operating mode loss while maximizing losses of competing modes. A preliminary experiment using an oscillator configuration has also been designed. The device could easily be scaled to 95 GHz to meet D.O.D. needs at that frequency.