Energy transfer efficiency of Blumlein-PFN with GaAs-PCSS

A Blumlein-PFN (BPFN) was fabricated and the factors that affect energy transfer efficiency were investigated. The BPFN is composed of ceramic capacitor, aluminum strip and GaAs-PCSS. Air-gap was selected as the BPFN pulse forming switch first, then expected pulse width and BPFNs impedance were obtained, which confirms the effectiveness of our design. Experiments were conducted with GaAs-PCSS under different electric field and trigger laser energy. Results show that the loss induced by maintaining electric field is negligible when electric field is greater than 25 kV/cm and trigger laser energy of PCSS is between 3.12 kV/cm and 4.94 kV/cm. When trigger laser energy equals to 30.4mJ and 3.5 mJ, the energy efficiency of matched load is 62.9% and 55%, and the equivalent connective resistance is 2.3 and 3.13 respectively. The connective resistance has been proved to be the most important factor which limits energy efficiency.