Vacuum Inductive Store/Pulse Compression Experiments on a High Power Accelerator Using Plasma Opening Switches

摘要

A new type of an opening switch which operates in vacuum and opens on a nanosecond timescale at voltages > 1 MV is described. This Plasma Opening Switch (POS) is able to conduct several hundred kiloamperes for approx. 50 nsec while a vacuum inductor is charged, then to open in < 10 nsec, delivering a large fraction of the stored energy to an electron-beam load. Preliminary experiments are described and a simple model of the POS operations is presented.