Microwave Pulse Compressors

High-Power Microwave fields between 500 MHz and 1 GHz can upset electronic equipment at a considerable distance. However, it remains challenging to find a suitable high-power microwave source for such fields. Such devices should have a bandwidth of 10-15%, reasonable efficiency, low cost, compact size, and peak power of about 1 GW. Existing sources, such as magnetrons, are both massive and expensive. Another source, the switched oscillator, is too small to store sufficient energy. Therefore, we propose developing a Microwave Pulse Compressor (MPC). Such devices are commonly used at particle accelerators at frequencies between 10 and 30 GHz, but they could be adapted to 500 MHz to 1 GHz. MPCs require only a medium-power source to drive them, so they have modest size and weight. MPCs can be built much larger than switched oscillators, so they can store much more energy. During Phase I we will design both a low-power and high-power version of the MPC. We will build the low-power version during Phase I. We will design the high-power version to operate somewhere within the frequency range of 500 MHz to 1 GHz, to be decided in consultation with AFRL, to be built in Phase II.