Nonstationary Behavior of a Gyrotron in the Presence of Reflections

Nonstationary behavior of a gyrotron in the presence of reflections is investigated by means of our time-dependent self-consistent code. It is shown that the traditionally accepted scenario of the transition from the single-frequency stationary operation regime to the chaotic nonstationary regime due to an increase in the magnitude of the reflection coefficient is not correct if a realistic non-fixed field profile is used in the simulations. In this case, the increase of the reflection coefficient above a certain threshold value (R 0.4) leads to an excitation of a number of modes of the mismatched gyrotron cavity. Then the gyrotron shows a very complicated periodic or quasiperiodic behavior. For higher reflection coefficients (R 0.85), the competition between the modes of the mismatched cavity leads to the suppression of the main mode by another one operating at higher frequency. The influence of the distance to the reflecting load on the gyrotron behavior is also demonstrated.