Design and development of pulsed electron beam accelerator 'AMBICA – 600'

Short duration, high power pulses with fast rise time and good flat-top are essentially required for driving pulsed electron beam diodes. To attain this objective, a dual resonant Tesla transformer based pulsed power accelerator 'AMBICA-600' has been developed. In this newly developed system, a coaxial water line is charged through single turn Tesla transformer that operates in the dual resonant mode. For making the accelerator compact, in the high power pulse forming line, water has been used as dielectric medium because of its high dielectric constant, high dielectric strength and high energy density. The coaxial waterline can be pulsed charged up to 600kV, has impedance of ∼5Ω and generates pulse width of ~60ns. The integrated system is capable of producing intense electron beam of 300keV, 60kA when connected to impedance matched vacuum diode. In this paper, system hardware details and experimental results of gigawatt electron beam generation have been presented.