Experiments on intense electron beam transport in mesh focusing arrays

Recent experiments on the transport of high-current relativistic electron beams in a vacuum using wire-mesh focusing are described. Experiments were carried out in two runs on the VIPER generator at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the SUPER-IBEX at the Naval Research Laboratory. Self-contained propagation of 44-kA beams at a maximum energy of 3 MeV (the corresponding value of ν/γ was ~0.4) was observed. The experiments are a one hundred-fold extrapolation of beam power over previous results. The beam behavior was in lose agreement with theory. The results show that mesh focusing may be applied to the most intense electron beams presently available from pulse power generators