Induced inhibition of electron acceleration in wiggler enhanced cyclotron autoresonance maser amplifiers

The performance of cyclotron autoresonance maser amplifiers can be substantially improved by using a properly spatially profiled helical wiggler. The wiggler behaves as a phase filter and tends to reduce the number of accelerating electrons. The proposed configuration is able to alleviate the severe problem of performance degradation by beam velocity spread. Simulation results show that more than 20% output efficiency can still be attained at 94 GHz, even with 5% beam velocity spread. The inclusion of the ac space charge field was observed to only slightly deteriorate the amplifier performance.