In recent years, several calibration-independent transmission/reflection methods have been developed to determine the complex permittivity of liquid materials. However, these methods experience their own respective defects, such as the requirement of multi measurement cells, or the presence of air gap effect. To eliminate these drawbacks, a fast calibration-independent method is proposed in this paper. There are two main advantages of the present method over those in the literature. First, only one measurement cell is required. The cell is measured when it is empty and when it is filled with liquid. This avoids the air gap effect in the approach, in which the structure with two reference ports connected with each other is needed to be measured. Second, it eliminates the effects of uncalibrated coaxial cables, adaptors, and plug sections; systematic errors caused by the experimental setup are avoided by the wave cascading matrix manipulations. Using this method, three dielectric reference liquids, i.e., ethanol, ethanediol, and pure water, and low-loss transformer oil are measured over a wide frequency range to validate the proposed method. Their accuracy is assessed by comparing the results with those obtained from the other well known techniques. It is demonstrated that this proposed method can be used as a robust approach for fast complex permittivity determination of liquid materials.

No abstract

This paper presents the effects of cathode materials on the oscillation mode of a virtual cathode oscillator (vircator). In the case of the stainless steel cathode, an oscillation mode hopping appeared with two separate frequencies. Interestingly, the vircator using the carbon fiber cathode exhibited an almost unchanged microwave frequency throughout the microwave pulse. To understand this phenomenon, several parameters are compared, including the diode voltage, accelerating gap, emitting area, and beam uniformity. It was found that a flat-top voltage and a relatively stable gap will provide a possibility of generating a constant microwave frequency. Further, the cathode operated in a regime where the beam current was between the space-charge limited current determined by Child–Langmuir law and the bipolar flow. On the cathode surface, the electron emission is initiated from discrete plasma spots and next from a continuing area, while there is a liberation process of multilayer gases on the anode surface. The changes in the emitting area of carbon fiber cathode showed a self-quenching process, which is not observed in the case of stainless steel cathode. The two-dimensional effect of microwave frequency is introduced, and the obtained results supported the experimental observations on the oscillation mode. By examining the cross section of electron beam, the electron beam for carbon fiber cathode was significantly centralized, while the discrete beam spots appeared for stainless steel cathode. These results show that the slowed diode closure, high emission uniformity, and stable microwave frequency tend to be closely tied.

High-power microwave driven vacuum dielectric window breakdown is found to be suppressed by external magnetic field with gyrofrequency Ω = eB/m close to angular frequency ω of rf electric field. This letter gives a particle-in-cell demonstration of the increasing of breakdown thresholds by such magnetic field. It is found that magnetic field with Ω ∼ ω mitigates the multipactor effect. Its saturation process occurs at upper boundary of the susceptibility diagram instead of the lower one. This decreases the dc electric field built on dielectric surface. The electron-dielectric interaction rate is lowered, especially in the half rf period with Erf × B force pointing out of the dielectric surface. The resulting flashover time delay is prolonged. Thereby, the power handling capability of the dielectric window is enhanced.

No abstract