Tesla Coil Design for Electron Gun Application

Abstract

The current project is to build an electron gun for X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) application. The electron gun will utilize field emission and extreme accelerating gradient to achieve very low emittance. However for long-term study of cathode characteristics, a stable pulsed voltage in the megavolt range is needed. The first project phase is to design and test a 500 kV pulser using a resonant air-core transformer (Tesla coil). Detailed results of simulations with Microwave Studioreg and PSpicereg for various coil geometries, tuning and coupling factors are given, and the optimum values for this application are given. In addition, experimental results are given for the most promising geometries.