High power traveling wave tube using ferroelectric electron gun

A high power traveling wave tube (TWT) using a ferroelectric cathode as the electron source is reported. The Ferroelectric electron gun (FEG) consists of PLZT ceramic and field enhancing grids, which allows an electron beam to be extracted from the FEG with relatively high beam quality. With the peak current exceeding 100 A, the electron beam is compressed downstream, before it enters into the slow wave structure of the TWT. Both the theoretical analysis and the experimental results show that the mechanism of electron emission is rather complicated. Nevertheless, the radio frequency experiment suggests that the TWT be capable of producing a microwave output at X-band (9.15 GHz), with a band-width of 580 MHz. The measured maximum output power is 5.8 MW, corresponding to 25.2 dB gain. This p