Design and testing of a fast, 50 kV solid-state kicker pulser

The ability to extract particle beam bunches from a ring accelerator in arbitrary order can greatly extend an accelerator's capabilities and applications. A prototype solid-state kicker pulser capable of generating asynchronous bursts of 50 kV pulses has been designed and tested into a 50 /spl Omega/ load. The pulser features fast rise and fall times and is capable of generating an arbitrary pattern of pulses with a maximum burst frequency exceeding 5 MHz. If required, the pulse-width of each pulse in the burst is independently adjustable. This kicker modulator uses multiple solid-state modules stacked in an inductive-adder configuration where the energy is switched into each section of the adder by a parallel array of MOSFETs. Test data, capabilities, and limitations of the prototype pulser are described.