Study of rectangular beam folded waveguide traveling-wave tube for terahertz radiation

To gain higher power with a lower cathode current density and a simpler structure, a novel rectangular beam folded waveguide traveling-wave tube (RB-FW-TWT) operating at 220 GHz is proposed and analyzed in this paper and compared with the normal circular beam (CB) FW TWT. The dispersion characteristic was investigated based on an equivalent circuit model. The interaction impedance and the S-parameter of a RB-FW traveling-wave tube were analyzed by numerical simulations. A 3-D particle-in-cell code CST particle studio was introduced to analyze the performance of RB-FW TWT. The influence of the initial electron energy, frequency, input power, guiding magnetic field, and aspect ratio of the RB tunnel on the circuit performance was observed, and physical explanations were given. It reveals that the output power of RB-FW can reach 51.1 dBm, 8.4% dBm higher than a CB-FW, with a 3 dB bandwidth of 35 GHz when the beam voltage and current are set to 14.25 kV and 140 mA, respectively. An aspect ratio of 0.4 is recommended to optimize the high-frequency properties and circuit performance.