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Fundamentals of high energy electron beam generation
High energy electron beam accelerator technology has been developed over the past three decades in response to military and energy-related requirements for weapons simulators, directed-energy weapons, and inertially-confined fusion. These applications required high instantaneous power, large beam energy, high accelerated particle energy, and high current. These accelerators are generally referred to as ``pulsed power`` devices, and are typified by accelerating potential of millions of volts (MV), beam current in thousands of amperes (KA), pulse duration of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds, kilojoules of beam energy, and instantaneous power of gigawatts to teffawatts (10{sup 9} to 10{sup 12} watts). Much of the early development work was directed toward single pulse machines, but recent work has extended these pulsed power devices to continuously repetitive applications. These relativistic beams penetrate deeply into materials, with stopping range on the order of a centimeter. Such high instantaneous power deposited in depth offers possibilities for new material fabrication and processing capabilities that can only now be explored. Fundamental techniques of pulse compression, high voltage requirements, beam generation and transport under space-charge-dominated conditions will be discussed in this paper.