Verification Of Magnetically Insulated Transmission Lines (MITL) For Power Flow Applications*

Time-independent solutions to electron flows in MITLs have been known for many years. The motivation behind these calculations was to understand experiments by predicting the integrated qualities such as flow current, anode current, cathode current, and voltage. In the process of verifying Finite Element electromagnetic Particle-in-Cell codes developed at Sandia, EMPHASIS andEMPIRE, it was found that these global quantities were very close to the theoretical results for coarse meshing. This is consistent with earlier codes used for the original designs of HERMES, Saturn, and Z. However, looking at spatial profiles (charge density, current density, velocity, electric and magnetic fields) a finer mesh was required for good comparison to theory. These details matter to the quality of the electron beam for many applications and surface plasma formation