Factorized form of the dispersion relations of a traveling wave tube

Abstract

The traveling tube (TWT) design in a nutshell comprises of a pencil-like electron beam (e-beam) in vacuum interacting with guiding it slow-wave structure (SWS). In our prior studies the e-beam was represented by one-dimensional electron flow and SWS was represented by a transmission line (TL). We extend in this paper our previously constructed field theory for TWTs as well the celebrated Pierce theory by replacing there the standard transmission line (TL) with its generalization allowing for the low frequency cutoff. Both the standard TL and generalized transmission line (GTL) feature uniformly distributed shunt capacitance and serial inductance, but the GTL in addition to that has uniformly distributed serial capacitance. We remind the reader that the standard TL represents a waveguide operating at the so-called TEM mode with no low frequency cutoff. In contrast, the GTL represents a waveguide operating at the so-called TM mode featuring the low frequency cutoff. We develop all the details of the extended TWT field theory and using a particular choice of the TWT parameters we derive a physically appealing factorized form of the TWT dispersion relations. This form has two factors that represent exactly the dispersion functions of non-interacting GTL and the e-beam. We also find that the factorized dispersion relations comes with a number of interesting features including: (i) focus points that belong to each dispersion curve as TWT principle parameter varies; (ii) formation of 'hybrid" branches of the TWT dispersion curves parts of which can be traced to non-interacting GTL and the e-beam.