Optimum Design of Electron Gun for 0.22-THz Traveling Wave Tubes

To improve the performance of a pencil beam electron gun for terahertz traveling wave tubes (TWT), a support vector regression (SVR) method combined with a goal attainment algorithm, which is used to optimize its structural parameters considering the periodic permanent magnetic (PPM) focusing system, is proposed in this article. Moreover, a parameter correction method to reduce the impact of the thermal expansion on the electron gun is proposed. An electron gun for 0.22-THz TWT gun is developed, in which a 30-mA/23.8-kV electron beam emitted by a curved barium–tungsten cathode with a beam loading of 4 A/cm
²
is achieved with the optimized parameters. To the high current density for THz beam–wave interaction, the area compression ratio of electron beam is used in beam tunnel and reaches 144. The experimental results are very similar to the simulation results, which indicate that the methods would be beneficial to the development of TWT.