Experiment and analysis on back-bombardment effect in thermionic RF gun

A serious problem for RF guns with thermionic guns is the back-bombardment effect, which makes the operation of the RF guns unstable owing to the instability of the cathode temperature. To find out how to solve the problem, we tried to evaluate the effect of back-bombardment. We have measured the temperature of cathode surface by an infrared radiation thermometer during the generation of electron beams from our S-band thermionic RF gun with 4.5 cavities. As a consequence, it was found that the temperature of cathode surface increased about 15°C while the beam was on. This implies that current density on cathode surface tends to be unstable because the back-streaming electrons give energy to the cathode. We calculated the amount of the energy transfer by means of an energy-balance equation of thermal transport. Then we compared the result with the total energy of back-streaming electrons calculated by a 2-D particle simulation code KUBLAI. By comparison of two results, we could roughly estimate the energy transfer from the back-streaming electrons within experimental error.