Secondary electron yield characterization of high porosity surfaces for multipactor-free microwave components

Abstract

We present secondary electron yield (SEY) characterization of high porosity surfaces for multipactor-free microwave components. We first calculate the SEYs of through porosity surfaces using Monte Carlo simulations. We demonstrate that these high porosity surfaces can be treated as homogeneous materials with low effective SEYs. We prove that a significant SEY reduction is attainable by high porosities, and above a certain porosity level, the entire effective SEY of the surface falls below unity, offering a multipactor free capability. We import the resultant SEYs into our semi-analytic approach to obtain multipactor susceptibility charts corresponding to different surface porosities. We predict the reduction of the multipactor-susceptible zone as the porosity increases and a total multipactor suppression with 0.66 through porosity level. The theoretical results were validated with multipactor experiments, and relatively good agreement was observed. Finally, we propose an alternative blind porosity approach that can offer the same multipactor suppression capabilities. The approach discussed herein can be adopted to design high-power multipactor-free microwave components.