Investigation of an X-band magnetically insulated transmission line oscillator

An X-band magnetically insulated transmission line oscillator (MILO) is designed and investigated numerically and experimentally for the first time. The X-band MILO is optimized in detail with KARAT code. In simulation, the X-band MILO, driven by a 720 kV, 53 kA electron beam, comes to a nonlinear steady state in 4.0 ns. High-power microwaves (HPM) of TEM mode is generated with an average power of 4.1 GW, a frequency of 9.3 GHz, and power conversion efficiency of 10.8% in durations of 0–40 ns. The device is fabricated according to the simulation results. In experiments, when the voltage is 400 kV and the current is 50 kA, the radiated microwave power reaches about 110 MW and the dominating frequency is 9.7 GHz. Because the surfaces of the cathode end and the beam dump are destroyed, the diode voltage cannot increase continuously. However, when the diode voltage is 400 kV, the average power output is obtained to be 700 MW in simulation. The impedance of the device is clearly smaller than the simulation prediction. Moreover, the duration of the microwave pulse is obviously shorter than that of the current pulse. The experimental results are greatly different from the simulation predictions. The preliminary analyses show that the generations of the anode plasma, the cathode flare and the anode flare are the essential cause for the remarkable deviation of the experimental results from the simulation predictions.