• K. Bishofberger, B.E. Carlsten, R. Faehl
  LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico

Particle beams have exhibited a two-stream instability for many decades; this undesirable trait has been well-understood for many years. We propose creating a scheme that uses a beam of electrons with two distinct energies that will develop the two-stream instability as a bunching mechanism. By controlling the beam parameters and seeding them with a low-level rf signal, a gain as high as 2.5 dB per centimeter is predicted. We show the theory behind this concept and recent progress in a developing experiment.