Small-size streak tube with high edge spatial resolution

Abstract A small-size streak tube with high spatial resolution over the entire working area is designed, manufactured and tested. The streak tube adopts curved photocathode and curved screen to improve the spatial resolution, especially at the edge area by decreasing the aberration. An accelerating slit electrode, instead of a mesh which limits the luminance gain of the tube, is employed next to the photocathode to improve the electrical resistance, reliability and the temporal resolution by increasing the electron acceleration field. The results in the numerical simulations show that the spatial resolution is 29 lp/mm @ MTF = 10% over the whole effective photocathode area. The tested results show that the small-size streak tube can offer static spatial resolution as high as 20 lp/mm over the whole effective area. And, the maximum point of the static spatial resolution 25 lp/mm, is deviated away from the center of the photocathode. The experiment results indicate that the spatial resolution is higher than 23.4 lp/mm @ MTF = 10%. The luminance gain can reach to 39.4 and the dimension of the streak tube is only Φ40 mm × 140 mm. Comparing with 5200 streak tube_XIOPM, we demonstrated that this small-size streak tube in our design not only possesses the compact size, but also obtain a much larger effective working area and much higher luminance gain.