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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We found that the start time in microwave generation of a relativistic backward wave oscillator (RBWO) for a slowly rising voltage pulse demonstrates a large jitter, which can be explained by the spread of explosive electron emission thresholds and plasma formation rates of the explosive emission cathode, and this large jitter is reduced greatly by a weak external RF signal. So, the effects of the emission threshold and plasma formation rate on the oscillation start time of a single RBWO and on the phase synchronization in two parallel RBWOs are investigated using particle-in-cell simulations. The 2D simulations show that a larger emission threshold and a faster plasma formation rate lead to a shorter start time due to the stronger shock excitation provided by the sharper beam current leading edge. For some special emission thresholds, the start time is abnormally long, which is due to the generation of other frequencies because of the shock excitation. The 3D simulations illustrate that with a larger emission threshold and a faster plasma formation rate, phase synchronization can be obtained in two parallel RBWOs even for a large voltage rise time. Therefore, we expect that by choosing the appropriate cathode emission threshold and plasma formation rate, it is possible to realize phase stabilization of an RBWO for a slowly rising voltage pulse even without an external RF signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate an efficiency of 70% with 5.1 GW microwave power for a diode voltage of 770 kV and a current modulation coefficient of 1.67 in a klystron-like relativistic backward wave oscillator. The device combines the advantages of reducing electron beam radius, adopting dual-cavity extractor, and introducing two pre-modulation cavities. A large dc space charge field is present due to the conversion of considerable potential energy to kinetic energy at the end of beam-wave interaction region. A nonlinear theory is developed to show that the dc space charge field can increase the current modulation coefficient and microwave conversion efficiency significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the efficiency increase of a klystron-like relativistic backward wave oscillator, the maximum axial electric field and harmonic current simultaneously appear at the end of the beam-wave interaction region, leading to a highly centralized energy exchange in the dual-cavity extractor and a very high electric field on the cavity surface. Thus, we present a method of distributed energy extraction in this kind of devices. Particle-in-cell simulations show that with the microwave power of 5.1 GW and efficiency of 70%, the maximum axial electric field is decreased from 2.26 MV/cm to 1.28 MV/cm, indicating a threefold increase in the power capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phase-locking approach using the priming effect is developed for high power relativistic backward wave oscillators (RBWO). A plasma switch is conceived to avoid the feedback effect. In experiment, multicavity RBWO of 200 MW with the 73 MHz half power bandwidth is phase-locked under the injection power ratio 0.044 for the frequency separation of 20 MHz. We found that it takes more time to reach stable phase-locking than to achieve saturation of RBWO generation. The external signal of higher power results in the longer time duration of phase locking. Besides phase-locking, the priming effect leads to longer microwave pulse duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The klystron-like relativistic backward wave oscillator (RBWO) with a dual-cavity extractor has demonstrated 10 GW output power with 48% efficiency in recent simulations. To realize radio-frequency (RF) phase control for the purpose of coherent power combining, a high-power high-efficiency klystron-like RBWO with an input signal is presented. In the device, an independent input cavity is introduced before the resonant reflector to reduce the leakage power from the input port, and the applied RF signal is injected into the input cavity through a mode convertor and a coaxial waveguide along the magnet, which avoids separating the magnet by the injection waveguide, and suppresses the asymmetric modes excited in the input cavity. For a frequency difference of 15 MHz between the input signal and free-running klystron-like RBWO, an input power of 10 MW is sufficient to control the phase of 10 GW output microwave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To increase the efficiency of the magnetically insulated line oscillator (MILO) and expand its frequency band, a coaxial transit time oscillator (TTO) is introduced to use the load currents of an annular MILO, called the annular MILO-TTO, which comprises an inward-emitting MILO, an outward-emitting MILO, and a coaxial TTO. In simulation, when the input power is 78 GW and the diode voltage is 520 kV, three microwaves with powers of 3.2, 9.6, and 7.0 GW are generated, with a total efficiency of 25.4%, in the inward-emitting MILO, the outward-emitting MILO, and the coaxial TTO, and the frequencies are 1.7, 3.3, and 4.2 GHz, corresponding to L, S, and C bands, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Results of analytic theory, numerical simulation, and experimental studies on a Ceronkov generator with coaxial slow wave structure are presented. The dispersion curves and the field patterns of the axial modes are given in the analytic theory, showing the operation mode of quasi-TEM mode. The numerical simulation results indicate that the device is featured by the resonance characteristics, the microwave frequency spectrum illustrates high purity, the dominant frequency remains fairly constant over a wide range of diode voltage, and the optimized efficiency of more than 37% is obtained. In preliminary experiment, a microwave pulse with frequency of 7.7 GHz, power of 1.3 GW, and efficiency of 28% was obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]