High-Power Millimeter-Wave BWO Driven by Sheet Electron Beam

The sheet beam vacuum electron device is an attractive choice for generating high-power high-frequency microwave radiation. A millimeter-wave sheet beam backward wave oscillator (BWO) is presented in this paper. The rectangular waveguide grating structure is used as its slow wave structure. The BWO is driven by a sheet beam with a cross-sectional area of 30 mm × 1 mm which is generated by a thin cathode. For a beam voltage of 167 kV and a beam current of 1.4 kA, the output power is 40 MW at 36.6 GHz. The beam-wave interaction efficiency is about 17%, which is higher than that of conventional hollow beam BWO. It is clear from the results presented in this paper that the sheet beam device is promising for producing high-efficiency high-power millimeter-wave radiation.