Studies of a Gyrotron Traveling-Wave Tube with Helically Corrugated Waveguides at IAP Ras: Results and Prospects

Abstract

The gyrotron traveling-wave tube (gyro-TWT) is a wideband version of gyrotron amplifiers, which produce pulsed or continuous-wave radiation in the millimeter-wavelength band at a power level that exceeds the powers produced by conventional TWTs with slow-wave structures and rectilinear beams by 1–2 orders of magnitude. Since 1996, researchers at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS) have been developing the concept of the gyro-TWT based on the use of a waveguide with a helically corrugated surface, which changes the dispersion of one of the eigenmodes in a circular waveguide radically. In this paper, we discuss several problems that arise in implementation of such devices, which many years of experimental studies have revealed, present the parameters of gyro-TWTs developed with allowance for specific applications of their end users, and discuss lines of further perfection of such amplifiers.