Particle-in-Cell (PIC) Simulations of A6 “Classic” “1.58/2.11/4.11” Geometry Relativistic or High-Voltage Magnetron With Radial Output of Microwave Power: A Historical Overview From Personal Experience

First “classic” A6 relativistic magnetron (A6 RM), or the A6 high-voltage magnetron, by definition of Prof. Michael I. Fuks, who has pointed out that the electron movement in “relativistic” magnetrons is essentially an electron drift with “nonrelativistic” drift velocity even if the applied voltage is truly “relativistic,” was built and tested almost 50 years ago. It is recognized now as one of the first operational 100-MW-class high-power electromagnetic vacuum electronic devices (HPEMVEDs). Today, the A6 RM is continuously studied both experimentally and computationally by many groups and laboratories. Computer simulations of different variants of the A6 RM sufficiently simplify the entire process of its redesigning, modeling, and prototyping by transforming all those activities from a laboratory environment into a simulation space, where all the necessary steps required to build a redesigned, more efficiently operating A6 RM, are performed numerically. Particle-in-cell (PIC) computer codes, such as ICEPIC and MAGIC, just to name a couple of them, are used for PIC simulations of the A6 RM, as well as almost all modern HPEMVEDs of different kinds and flavors.