The original purpose of this research was an investigation into the use of slow space charge waves on weakly relativistic electron beams for ion acceleration. The work had three main objectives namely, the development of a suitable ion injector, the growth and study of the properties of slow space charge waves on an electron beam, and a combination of the two components parts into a suitable proof of principle demonstration of the wave accelerator. This work focusses on the first two of these objectives.

This report discusses the following experimental and theoretical developments: traveling wave tube amplifiers; coaxial beam amplifiers; ferroelectric ceramics; and microwave systems. (LSP).

Observation of accelerated protons during the injection of rotating relativistic electron beams into neutral hydrogen (50 mTorr to 400 mTorr) indicated that ions from the beam-formed plasma are trapped and accelerated by a potential well at the beamfront. Measurements show that the number of accelerated protons decreases as the beamfront velocity is increased. Moreover, at a given velocity, the number accelerated is relatively insensitive to the neutral gas pressure.

Collective methods of ion acceleration using intense relativistic electron beams (IREB) have stimulated a great deal of interest in the past few years. The main virtue of an IREB collective ion accelerator is the high internal electric field strength. The primary drawback has been an insufficient ion energy gain or inadequate scaleability. An extensive study for generating a high quality electron beam has been done and is presented in Section II. In Section III an intense ion injector study was conducted by the method of computer simulation. The last addition to the proposal was a design for producing a toroidal magnetic field. This field will be needed in a future study of high energy and high current electron beams.