Theory Analysis of Nonlinear Excitation of Second Harmonic THz Gyrotron for DNP-NMR

As an important parameter, start current reveals the excitation condition of cavity modes. Normally, the method of successive iterations with one mode associated in the calculation is used to get the start current, which just reflects the self-excitation conditions in the presence of single mode. Nevertheless, in many cases, the prior-excited mode may affect the start current of the subsequent ones. In this article, we re-derived electron motion equations with two modes involved in the calculation and calculated the start current numerically based on those equations. We analyzed start currents of operation mode TE26+ and parasitic modes of a 394-GHz gyrotron with the two methods. In the calculation using the conventional method, TE26+ satisfies self-excitation condition while TE26− does not. In the calculation using the latter method, the start current of TE26− decreases under the influence of TE26+. This nonlinear oscillation of TE26− is further observed in time domain multimode simulation. In practical application, the beam velocity spread, ohmic loss, and high-frequency loss are inevitable. We studied their effects on mode interaction and then optimized the operation parameters. When the equivalent conductivity is $1.7e^{7}~\text {s/m}$ and beam velocity spread is 0.03, the optimized output power is 149.2 W.