Beam-Wave Interaction in Periodic and Quasi-Periodic Structures

During the past seven years I have been involved in the investigation of high- power microwave sources for accelerator and radar applications. As for many others before me, the starting point of this book was a collection of notes on theoretical topics out of the material I had been working on. The notes were the core of a course for graduate students at Cornell University. When I started to prepare these notes it seemed a fairly straight-forward and not very time-consuming task since I had most of the material well organized. Today, three years after the preparation of the first notes, I can only wonder how naive this thought was. Most of my work was oriented towards analytic and quasi-analytic tech- niques for the investigation of the interaction of an electron beam with elec- tromagnetic waves. These topics are presented in Chaps. 4 and 6. However, for a systematic elaboration of these topics it was necessary to provide some general background, therefore parts of what are today Chaps. 2, 3, and 5 were prepared. Related topics of acceleration concepts were also prepared to some extent but I ran out of time and the material (Chap. 8) was not delivered. In the meantime, various sections of this book were taught at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology and Ben-Gurion University. In the last version I included a discussion on free electron lasers (Chap. 7).