Guest Editorial Special Issue on Vacuum Electronics

The Time has come once again to chronicle recent advances in the vibrant and dynamic field of vacuum electronics. This Special Issue, published by the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, follows successful past issues published every four or five years since 2001. Dr. David Abe and Dr. David Whaley headed the group of Guest Editors for this issue, relying heavily on the expertise and dedication of their fellow Guest Editors, Dr. Jinjun Feng, Dr. John Jelonnek, and Dr. Lalit Kumar. Together, manuscripts covering the wide range of topics found within the following pages were ushered through a rigorous peer-reviewed process to provide a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in vacuum electronics technology for 2018. In a testament to the vitality and widespread activity in the field, contributions to this issue were submitted nearly equally from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The subject matter of these contributions spans such a wide swath of applications that it is difficult to imagine that our lives are not impacted in some way every day by the benefits that this technology area provides. Communications, radar, accelerator and fusion research, satellite data links, and electronic defense are but a few examples.