Comparative analysis of single-surface multipactor discharges at different microwave frequencies

Abstract

The dielectric multipactor discharge in vacuum has become one of the main factors limiting the power capacity of high-power microwave system. In this paper, the particle-in-cell method is used to study the effects of microwave frequency on the single-surface multipactor discharge under the fixed ratio of microwave field to frequency. As the microwave frequency increases, the change in the amplitude of mean electron energy and secondary electron yield is very small, but the number of electrons in a steady state increases linearly. This results in an increase in the delay time for the number of electrons to reach the steady state. The thickness of normalized electron number density decreases with the increase of microwave frequency, because the normal restoring electric field increases linearly with the microwave frequency. Finally, we confirm that the multipactor threshold increases linearly with the microwave frequency, which is consistent with the trend of the experimental results.