Intense Charged Particle Beams

Abstract

Pulsed electron and ion beams have been developing, mainly in the USA in connection with inertial confinement fusion, to intensities of millions of amperes at 1–10 x 106 V, with durations of the order of 100 ns. The electron beams also find application in z-pinches, as drivers of pulsed gas lasers and as high power sources of coherent radiation (in the form of the relativistic microwave magnetron, the electron cyclotron maser and the free electron laser).