Precision fast kickers for kiloampere electron beams

These kickers will be used to make fast dipoles and quadrupoles which are driven by sharp risetime pulsers to provide precision beam manipulation for high current kA electron beams. This technology will be used on the 2/sup nd/ axis of the DARHT linac at LANL. It will be used to provide 4 micropulses of pulse width up to 120 nsec. Selected from a 2 /spl mu/sec., 2 kA, 20 MeV macropulse. The fast pulsers will have amplitude modulation capability to compensate for beam-induced steering effects and other slow beam centroid motion to within the bandwidth of the kicker system. Scaling laws derived from theory will be presented along with extensive experimental data obtained on the test bed ETA-II.