Experimental Investigation of Nonlinear Electron-RF Field Interaction

真空电子器件取代了固态器件，为涉及高功率、高效率和某些恶劣环境的许多微波系统功能提供了潜在的最佳工程解决方案。目前扩展高功率微波电子器件的技术水平的努力加剧了理解电子与射频场之间相互作用的高度非线性和色散性质的需要。本研究将研究在微波交叉场放大器(CFA)的电子-射频相互作用空间中，电子云中慢电路波的自收缩导致形成电场孤子和对流电子涡旋的情况。这些实验包括(1)使用纯电子等离子体和标准等离子体诊断来模拟简单的CFA设备；以及(2)开发先进的诊断技术来搜索商业425 MHz CFA中是否存在孤子。这项工作为基于孤子理论理解高功率微波器件中的高度非线性效应奠定了必要的物理基础。拟议的工作在本质上也是非常基础的，可能会促进将几个公认的等离子体概念转移到微波电子器件的研究中。

Vacuum electron devices, instead of solid-state devices, provide potentially the best engineering solutions for many microwave system functions involving high power, high efficiency and certain kinds of harsh environments. The current effort to expand the state-of-art of high power microwave electron devices has intensified the need to understanding the highly nonlinear and dispersive nature of the interaction between electrons and rf fields. The current research will investigate the situation where the self-contraction of a slow- circuit-wave in an electron cloud results in the formation of electric field solitons and convective electron vortices in the electron-rf interaction space of a microwave crossed-field amplifier (CFA). The experiments include (1) simulation of a simple CFA device using a pure electron plasma and standard plasma diagnostics; and (2) development of advanced diagnostic techniques to search for the existence of solitons in a commercial 425 MHz CFA. The proposed work can establish the much needed physical basis for the application of a soliton based theory to understand highly nonlinear effects in high power microwave devices. The proposed work is also very fundamental in nature and may foster the transfer of several well-established plasma concepts to the study of microwave electron devices.