Sheet Beam Development for mm-Wave Microwave Tubes at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Currently ongoing at Los Alamos National Laboratory is a program to develop high-power, planar 100-300 GHz traveling-wave tubes (TWTs). The promise of planar TWT technology is: 1) the radio-frequency (RF) structures lend themselves well to established micro-fabrication techniques: and 2) by spreading the electron beam in one dimension, we effectively eliminate the beam self force and can transport a high net beam current, resulting in very high-power devices. An enabling technology for this effort is a sheet electron beam source