travelling wave tube

Noun

travelling-wave tube (plural travelling-wave tubes)

1. A type of vacuum tube which amplifies electromagnetic signals, where the electron gun fires down the tube with an unmodulated electron beam, that passes through an interaction array, where the EM-signal is fed, which interacts with the electron beam, bunching the electrons, and transferring power to the signal.
   • From the early days of the invention of traveling wave tubes and other devices employing electron beams, there have been efforts to understand the mechanisms and physics of RF signal amplification in those devices.2020, Alexander Figotin, An Analytic Theory Of Multi-stream Electron Beams In Traveling Wave Tubes, World Scientific, →ISBN, page 40

   Synonyms:

   TWT