Chapter INTRODUCTION
1 Robert J. Barker and Edl Schamiloglu
1.1 SETTING AND MOTIVATION
This book is meant to serve as a definitive reference book for all individuals interested
in High-Power Microwave (HPM) sources for possible future military applications. It
does not discuss full military HPM systems concepts, nor does it cover specific military
HPM applications. Security classification restrictions would obviously not permit such
discussions in the open literature. Nevertheless, our military HPM focus, combined
with the rich bibliographic references provided for each chapter, make this book impor-
tant and unique.
Our target audience consists of technically savvy professionals whose interests
encompass the emerging technologies of the defense arena. Readers who seek a basic
HPM textbook are referred to the forthcoming second edition of High Power
Microwaves by Benford, Swegle, and Schamiloglu [1]. In fact, the detailed explanations
found therein will be invaluable for HPM-novice readers of this book. Furthermore,
readers whose interests only extend to U.S. Department of Energy (US-DoE) concerns
(e.g. , particle accelerators and the heating of fusion plasmas) would be better served by
such works as High Power Microwaves edited by Granatstein and Alexeff [2], or con-
ference proceedings such as High Energy Density Microwaves edited by Phillips [3].
An important distinction that sets this book (and the entire HPM-MURI Program
described in the Preface) apart from past HPM studies is its careful integration of
knowledge and experience from the commercial vacuum electronics community. We
believe strongly that the military HPM community should embrace the proven experi-
ence and knowledge of established microwave tube engineering. The "rapid prototyp-
ing" environment of HPM's formative years argued against the expensive and time-
consuming methodologies used by the tube manufacturers. Now, however, as increased
emphasis is placed on converting mature HPM device concepts into fieldable, practical,
reliable systems, logic dictates increased attention to proven microwave design and
fabrication practices. Throughout this book references are made to engineering tech-
niques that are well documented [4]-[6] and that should form an integral part of the
technical libraries of groups who are active in the HPM arena.
1.2 HIGH-POWER MICROWAVES
High-Power Microwaves (HPM) is an imprecise term used by several communities
studying the generation of coherent electromagnetic radiation spanning the frequency
range of approximately 1 GHz to over 100 GHz. One interpretation of the term is high-
average-power microwaves , which implies long-pulse duration, high-repetition rate or
1
2 Chapter 1 Introduction
continuous beam (referred to as "cw") sources. Another interpretation is high-peak-
power microwaves, which implies short-pulse duration, a low-repetition rate, or "single-
shot" sources. Researchers in the former Soviet Union used the term Relativistic High-
Frequency Electronics to describe this discipline.
The high-average-power microwave sources of today are exemplified by devices
such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's (SLAC) S-Band Klystron, which has
demonstrated the generation of 150 MW at 3 GHz. This device has gradually evolved
over the past six decades from the original works of Hansen, the Heils, and the Varian
brothers. (See [7] for a review of the development of the klystron.) The community that
the klystron and similar devices belong to can be referred to as the "conventional tube"
or "vacuum electronics" community. It is primarily an electrical engineering commu-
nity. This community employs very disciplined time-proven techniques for engineering
their microwave sources. They have design rules and conditioning techniques that can
almost be categorized as lore. The strict adherence to their engineering guidelines,
coupled with advances in both materials and calculational techniques, have led to the
gradual advances in the outputs of their devices that we have witnessed to date. This
community seeks to produce reliable, working microwave sources in response to specific
customer requirements. Typical government clients of this community'S technology
would include the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) for accelerator and plasma heat-
ing applications, and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) for communications. Much of the prior HPM literature has been biased
toward the high-average-power community.
The high-peak-power but shorter pulse-length microwave sources of today are
exemplified by devices such as the Magnetically Insulated Line Oscillator (MILO) [8]
at the Air Force Research Laboratory/Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force
Base, New Mexico. The MILO has demonstrated the generation of 2 GW at 1.2 GHz
with pulse length under 200 ns. This device was first proposed in 1987, but the com-
munity from which it originates dates back to the pioneering work of Nation at Cornell
University in 1970 [9], and Kovalev and colleagues at the Lebedev Institute in the Soviet
Union in 1973 [10]. The community that developed the MILO, as well as the intense
beam-driven relativistic cousins of the conventional tubes, is primarily the plasma
physics community. Interest among plasma physicists in coherent sources of electro-
magnetic radiation was spawned by several developments. One was the detailed experi-
mental and theoretical understanding of the interaction between charged particles and
electromagnetic waves that was gained as part of the magnetic confinement fusion
programs in the 1950s. Another is the development of pulsed power as a major field
in the late 1960s, an enabling technology that grew out of the development of sources
for radiography. Pulsed power technology provided the ability to generate intense
relativistic electron beams, high-perveance! beams that provided the possibility of gen-
erating high instantaneous power levels of coherent electromagnetic radiation. A
further development was the availability of sophisticated particle-in-cell computer
simulation tools, coupled with increasingly powerful computers that provided the
sophistication required to analyze intense beam-driven sources. Finally, the increasing
interest in developing directed energy weapons was the catalyst that hastened the join-
I Perveance is defined as the ratio 1/ V 3/ 2 where I is the electron beam current and V is the beam voltage.
Section 1.2 High-Power Microwaves 3
ing of these various factors, resulting in research programs focused on high instanta-
neous power microwave sources.
This book primarily addresses the interests of the latter of those two communities,
although the vacuum electronics community shares many of those same interests. It
presents the state-of-the-art in the evolution of high instantaneous power microwave
sources that has been achieved through a program that has merged the talents of
universities, DoD laboratories, as well as industry in the United States. Following
the convention of Benford and Swegle [11], we invoke the term High-Power
Microwaves (HPM) to denote sources producing coherent electromagnetic radiation
from 1 GHz to over 100 GHz with an instantaneous power of at least 100 MW.
Figure 1.1 presents a comparison of the peak- and average-power characteristics for
conventional and high-power microwave sources.
As discussed in the Preface, this book is not intended to be a comprehensive
treatise describing all classes of HPM sources. Rather, the intent is to describe the
advances in the field that have occurred primarily under the auspices of an Air Force
Office of Scientific Research-administered Department of Defense Multidisciplinary
University Research Initiative (MURI). Its five-year duration and U.S. $15M funding
level made it the largest single HPM basic research program in history and endowed it
with a breadth and depth of activities that marked it as a watershed. The reader is
referred to earlier books and articles that are referenced in the chapters for a more
complete discussion of HPM sources.
There is another interesting evolution of military HPM research and development
(R&D) activities that is carefully reflected in this book. This involves the increasing
military (and commercial) interest in "moderate" power (on the order of 100 kW)
higher frequency microwave sources. The internal length scales of such devices generally
shrink with the increasing frequency of the radiation to be produced. Therefore, for a
given operating voltage, the electric field stresses encountered in such devices can easily
reach values similar to those found in GW-Ievel, lower frequency HPM sources. This
lOW IOOW 1 KW lOOKW I MW
Figure 1.1 Peak power vs. average-power
Average power
domains for microwave production.
4 Chapter 1 Introduction
results in a general commonality of physics and engineering concerns between those two
classes of devices. For that reason, discussions of high-frequency, sub-MW-Ievel device
concepts are purposely included in this book.
Researchers working in the higher frequency regimes refer to the so-called quality
factor Pf2, where P is the output power in GW and f is the frequency in GHz.
Figure 1.2 illustrates the technical progress made over the past decades in achieving
greater quality factors for various device concepts. This evolution is crucial to the
success of a number of 94 GHz military systems that will be emerging in the near future.
1.3 ORGANIZATION AND SCOPE OF THE BOOK
In order to best describe the organization of the book, we first present an overview of a
generic HPM system in terms of its components, as sketched in Figure 1.3. This book
focuses on the three system elements comprising the Microwave Source section depicted
in the figure diagram.
Each chapter adheres to a "background/obstacles/future works" sequence in its
presentation. Each begins with an historical perspective of the given topical area.
Highlights are presented that accurately present the state-of-the-art. Then the major
remaining scientific challenges are discussed. Finally, avenues for future progress are
described if such opportunities are perceived by the respective chapter contributors.
Chapter 2 provides the motivation for interest in HPM from a U.S. Department of
Defense perspective. The scope of this chapter is much broader than that of this book
so that HPM research can be presented in the broad context of DoD interest in micro-
wave sources for a variety of applications.
104
x RDG
103 Relativistic ,x FEL
devices
102 X Magnetrons
N 10 x Magnetron
N
:I: x BWO
S Conventional
~ devices
2- Klystrons
~
e, 10-1
10-2
10-3 Magnetrons
10-4
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Figure 1.2 Evolution of microwave devices in terms of the quality factor Pf2.
BWO = backward wave ocsillator, FEL = free electron laser, and
RDG = relativistic diffraction generator (the latter two sources are not
discussed in this book).
Section 1.3 Organization and Scope of the Book 5
1< MICROWAVE SOURCE >1
Electronbeam rf extraction
Figure 1.3 Block diagram of an HPM
system.
Chapters 3-6 review HPM device concepts that have been studied and developed
in the context of the coordinated research program discussed in the Preface. Chapter 3
presents information on the sources that have been generating the highest instanta-
neous powers to date in this research program. Chapter 4 discusses the pulse-shortening
phenomenon. The editors decided to group this chapter with the source chapters since,
whereas Chapter 3 presents the "good news" (outstanding achievements in terms of
high-power levels generated, greater insight gained into the understanding of source
physics), Chapter 4 presents the "bad news" (greater powers generated but energy per
pulse remains fairly constant). The remaining two HPM-device chapters then review
advances in Cerenkov devices (Chapter 5) and Gyrotron Oscillators and Amplifiers
(Chapter 6).
Chapters 7-11 discuss so-called enabling technologies for HPM sources. In this
regard, much of the information in these chapters can be considered as having one of
two purposes: either mitigating the pulse-shortening problem discussed in Chapter 4
and/or making HPM more practical from a systems standpoint. Chapter 7 discusses
advances in the use of plasma prefill in HPM sources to beneficially affect device
operation. Such a plasma fill can provide broad frequency agility, enhance microwave
generation efficiency, and decrease guide magnetic field requirements. Chapter 8
reviews advances that are on the way to making HPM more practical. The advent of
a "Smart Tube" HPM source is discussed, in addition to other strategies for controlling
the radiation generation process in these devices. Chapter 9 discusses advances in
cathodes that can lead to increases in emitted current densities while minimizing the
problem of plasma formation. The broader view of electron guns for a wide spectrum of
sources is also presented. Chapter 10 reviews advances in the theoretical understanding
of multipactor and other phenomena associated with window and radio frequency (rf)
breakdown. It also discusses novel materials that are being developed for mitigating
breakdown. Finally, Chapter 11 reviews advances in computer modeling and simula-
tion techniques that have been the vanguard of the progress attained in HPM source
development.
6 Chapter I Introduction
Chapter 12 concludes this book by discussing alternative approaches for generat-
ing high-power microwaves that were not discussed elsewhere in the book. It also
isolates and enumerates the specific scientific challenges that remain to be conquered
before practical military HPM systems can flourish. In some sense, the HPM commu-
nity is gradually adopting many of the engineering techniques used by the conventional
tube community. The question that remains is whether continued progress in generating
high-power microwaves will require the expensive, though time-proven, techniques of
the conventional tube community, or whether advances in the understanding of source
physics, coupled with advances in enabling technologies, will lead to compact, portable
HPM sources that will find practical embodiments in the new millennium.
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[I] Benford, J., J. Swegle, and E. Schamiloglu. High Power Microwaves. 2nd ed. Bristol, UK:
Institute of Physics Publishing (in preparation).
[2] Granatstein, V. L. and I. Alexeff, Eds. High-Power Microwave Sources. Norwood,
MA: Artech House, 1987.
[3] Phillips, R. M., Ed. High Energy Density Microwaves. (AlP Conference Proceedings 474,
Woodbury, NY: 1999.
[4] Rosebury, F., Handbook of Electron Tube and Vacuum Techniques. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, 1965.
[5] Sedlacek, M., Electron Physics of Vacuum and Gaseous Devices. New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1996.
[6] Knoll, M., Materials and Processes of Electron Devices. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag,
1959.
[7] Caryotakis, G., "The Klystron: A Microwave Source of Surprising Range and Endurance."
Phys. Plasmas 5 (1998): 1590.
[8] Haworth, M. D., G. Baca, J. Benford, T. Englert, K. Hackett, K. J. Hendricks, D. Henley,
M. LaCour, R. W. Lemke, D. Price, D. Ralph, M. Sena, D. Shiffler, and T. A. Spencer.
"Significant Pulse-Lengthening in a Multigigawatt Magnetically Insulated Transmission
Line Oscillator," IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. 26 (1998): 312.
[9] Nation, J. A., "On the Coupling of a High-current Relativistic Beam to a Slow Wave
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[10] Kovalev, N. F., M. I. Petelin, M. D. Raiser, A. V. Smorgonsky, and L. E. Tsopp.
"Generation of Powerful Electromagnetic Radiation Pulses by a Beam of Relativistic
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