Abstract
A high power gyrotron traveling wave amplifier operating in the low-loss TE01 mode is currently being tested at UC Davis that is driven by a 100 kV, 5 A electron beam with a pitch angle (v ⊥ /v z ) of unity and velocity spread of 5%. The amplifier is predicted by large-signal simulations to generate 140 kW at 92 GHz with 28% efficiency, 50 dB saturated gain and 5% bandwidth. The stability of the amplifier from oscillation has been investigated with linear codes. The threshold current for the absolute instability of the TE01 operating mode for the chosen operating parameters is predicted to be 10 A. To suppress the potential gyro-BWO interactions, the interaction circuit with a cutoff frequency of 91 GHz has been loaded with distributed loss [1] so that the single-pass attenuation is 90 dB at 93 GHz as shown below. A coaxial input coupler with 3% bandwidth is employed with a predicted and measured coupling of 1 dB and 2dB, respectively.