International Conference on Plasma Sciences

Monica Blank

Monica Blank received the B.S. degree (Electrical Engineering) from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. in 1988, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees (Electrical Engineering) in 1991 and 1994, respectively, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. In 1994 she joined the Vacuum Electronics Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory, where she was responsible for the design and demonstration of high-power millimeter wave vacuum electronic devices for radar applications. In 1999 she joined the Gyrotron Team at Communications and Power Industries (formerly Varian) where she continues her work on millimeter wave gyrotron amplifiers and oscillators. Dr. Blank has received several professional awards, including the 1998 Alan Berman Publication Award at Naval Research Laboratory, the Robert L. Woods Award for Excellence Vacuum Electronics Technology in 1999, and an R&D 100 Award in 2015. She is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. Dr. Blank has also previously served several terms on IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Executive Committee, one term on the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Administrative Committee, and was a Senior Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science from 2009-2015.

High-power and high-frequency gyrotrons: development and applications

Communications & Power Industries (CPI) is currently involved in the design and development of high-power and high-frequency gyrotron oscillators and amplifiers for a variety of applications, including fusion, spectroscopy, and millimeter-wave radar. The gyrotron's unique and unparalleled abilities to deliver high peak and average output powers at frequencies up to and into the terahertz regime render it an obvious choice for applications requiring powers from kilowatts to megawatts at hundreds of gigahertz. State-of-the-art gyrotrons for various applications as well as new directions in gyrotron research and development will be discussed. For example, experimental demonstrations of megawatt-class gyrotrons at 117.5 GHz for the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics in the US, and 140 GHz for the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmasphysik in Germany and the EAST tokamak at CAS-ASIPP in China, will be described. In addition, recent advances in terahertz gyrotrons for dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, including Bruker and CPI’s family of commercial gyrotrons at 263, 395, 527, and 593 GHz, will be detailed. Finally, gyrotrons for current and future high-frequency radar applications will be discussed.