A compact, high-voltage e-beam pulser

It is well established that pulsed power technology is relatively cheaper than other architectures aiming to produce high-current, high-voltage electron or ion accelerators. The footprints of most pulsed power accelerators are large, making them incompatible for applications that require either portability or a large number of similar components for very high power devices (like Z-pinch accelerators). Most of the modern pulsed power accelerators require several stages of pulse conditioning (pulse forming) to convert the multimicrosecond pulse of a Marx generator output to the 50-100 ns pulse required for an electron or ion diode or a cell cavity of an inductive voltage adder. The authors propose a new method for constructing high-current, high-voltage pulsed accelerators. The salient future of the approach is switching and inductively adding the pulses at low voltage straight out of the capacitors through low inductance transfer and soft iron core isolation. High currents can be achieved by feeding each core with many capacitors connected in parallel in a circular array. High voltage is obtained by inductively adding many stages in series. Utilizing the presently available capacitors and switches we can build a 300 kA, 7 MV generator with an overall outer diameter (including capacitors and switches) of 1.2 m and length of 6.5 m. In addition, the authors' accelerator can be multipulsed with a repetition rate up to the capacitor specifications and no less than 10 Hz. As an example the design of a 3-MeV, 100-kA accelerator is presented and analyzed.