The NRL Modified Betatron Accelerator Pulsed Power Systems

Abstract : The purpose of this article is to describe the pulsed power components of NRL's Modified Betatron Accelerator (MBA). The MBA has the design goal to produce multikiloampere electron beams with peak energy of 50 MeV. This accelerator comprises several pulsed power subsystems: the betatron and toroidal magnetic fields, a precision 1.25 MeV, 10 kA injector and auxiliary electromagnets to facilitate beam capture. The magnets have been designed to produce fields with low temporal and spatial errors 1% and are powered by capacitor bank discharge. The injector generates pulses [20 nsec risetime and falltime, 20 - 30 nsec flattop] having ripple 1% and shot-to-shot variation 1.5%. An experiment to study injection and beam trapping into the 1 m radius vacuum chamber is underway.