Particle simulation of a high-power gyrotron oscillator

Abstract

A self consistent and time-dependent particle code has been developed to simulate the beam-wave dynamics in a gyrotron oscillator. The code is first applied to investigate the effect of the self-consistent field profile on the scaling of the cavity-filling rate with beam current. The fixed-field theory predicts that the transient-wave growth rate depends linearly on the beam current. The simulation results agree with the theoretical prediction at low beam currents. As the beam current increases, the modified field profile changes the nature of the gain scaling from linear to nonlinear. At higher beam currents, the excited wave is observed to exhibit the behavior of the modulated oscillation, due to unequal couplings to the forward- and backward-going waves by the beam. Associated with such amplitude modulation is a periodic variation of the self-consistent field profile. At still higher beam currents, the system becomes chaotic, showing the effect of periodic doubling. Simulation results are presented for the efficiency, the self-consistent field profile, and the scaling of the transient growth rate with the beam current. >