Untriggered Water Switching

Abstract
Recent experiments indicate that synchronous untriggered multichannel switching in water will permit the development of relatively simple, ultra-low impedance, short pulse, relativistic electron beam (REB) accelerators. These experiments resulted in the delivery of a 1.5 MV, 0.75 MA, 15 ns pulse into a 2 Ω line with a current risetime of 2 x 1014 A/sec. The apparatus consisted of a 3 MV Marx generator and a series of three 112 cm wide strip water lines separated by 2 edge-plane water-gap switches. The Marx generator charged the first line in < 400 ns. The first switch then formed 5 or more channels. The second line was charged in 60 ns and broke down with 10 to 25 channels at a mean field of 1.6 MV/cm. The closure time of each spark channel along both switches was measured with a streak camera and showed low jitter. The resulting fast pulse line construction is simpler and should provide considerable cost savings from previous designs. Multiples of these low impedance lines in parallel can be employed to obtain power levels in the 1014 W range for REB fusion studies.

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