A LONG-PULSE MILLIMETER-WAVE FREE-ELECTRON MASER EXPERIMENT

A new experimental Free Electron Maser (FEM) facility is described which operates in the millimeter-wave regime. The experiment demonstrates that high gain and beam extraction efficiency can be obtained with low-current but high-quality electron beams. In the oscillator configuration, microwave powers of 110 kW were achieved with a 300-kV, 4-A beam, corresponding to a beam extraction efficiency of 9.2%. At low beam currents, with the system operating in the linear regime, the FEM gain curve was measured. The experiment uses a Pierce-type gun with a calculated beam emittance of 10.7-mm mrad at 300 kV and 4 A. The Higgler is of the iron permanent magnet hybrid design. The experiment is intended as a first step towards the development of CW devices that use beam energy recovery to make use of low-current, high-voltage power supplies. © 1990 IEEE