Double-mode and double-beam staggered double-vane traveling-wave tube with high-power and broadband at terahertz band

In this paper, a 220 GHz broadband and high-power staggered double-vane traveling-wave tube has been designed and verified. Firstly, a planar double-beam staggered double-vane slow-wave structure is proposed. By using the double-mode operation scheme, the transmission performance and bandwidth have been almost increased with twice as the single mode. Second, to satisfy the high output power requirement and improve the stability of the traveling-wave tube, a double pencil-beam electron optical system has been designed, the 20–21 kV driven voltage and the 2 × 80 mA current are set as the design target. By using the mask portion and the control electrode in the double beam gun, the two pencil beams can be focused with a compression ratio of 7 along their respective centers with narrow distances of about 0.18 mm with good stability. The uniform magnetic focusing system has also been optimized. The stable transmission distance of planar double electron beams could reach 45 mm with the focusing magnetic field of 0.6 T, which was long enough to cover the whole high-frequency system (HFS). Then, to verify the availability of the electron optical system and the performance of the slow-wave structure, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation has also been carried out with the whole HFS. Results demonstrate that the beam-wave interaction system can get a nearly 310 W peak output power at 220 GHz with a 20.6 kV optimized beam voltage and beam current of 2 × 80 mA, the gain is of 38 dB with the 3-dB bandwidth over 35 dB about 70 GHz. Finally, the high precision microstructures fabrication has been carried out to verify the performance of the HFS, the results show that the bandwidth and the transmission properties are in good agreement with simulation result. Thus, the proposed scheme in this paper is expected to develop the high-power and ultra-wideband terahertz band radiation source with potential applications in the future.