Patents

A novel sheet-beam plasma cathode electron (SPCE) gun is presented. The discharge in the SPCE-Gun is an axially symmetric self-sustained transient low pressure gas discharge, which has been used to generate the sheet electron beam. A delayed voltage breakdown together with a fast current rise in this device results in a class of highly intense sheet electron beam generation. To diagnose the generated beam, the beam has been extracted in drift space region. An arrangement of three isolated metallic sheets has been proposed for qualitative assessment of the beam. Also the actual shape and size of the sheet electron beam have been obtained through a nonconventional method by proposing a dielectric charging technique and SEM based image analysis. The beam current density ~1 kA/cm2 has been achieved and propagated more than 200 mm distance in the drift space region maintaining the sheet structure without assistance of any external magnetic field.