RF pulse shaping for gated electron mirrors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pulse-shaping technique for switchable electron mirrors, significantly improving the fidelity of the pulse shape through an iterative pre-compensation method, applicable to various nonlinear systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a new general method for electronic pulse shaping using iterative pre-compensation, demonstrated on a switchable electron mirror with high fidelity.

Findings

RMS error reduced by approximately 100 times

Effective pulse shaping in nonlinear systems

Broad applicability of the method

Abstract

We present the design and prototype of a switchable electron mirror, along with a technique for driving it with a flat-top pulse. We employ a general technique for electronic pulse-shaping, where high fidelity of the pulse shape is required but the characteristics of the system, which are possibly nonlinear, are not known. This driving technique uses an arbitrary waveform generator to pre-compensate the pulse, with a simple iterative algorithm used to generate the input waveform. We demonstrate improvement in RMS error of roughly two orders of magnitude over an uncompensated waveform. This is a broadly applicable, general method for arbitrary pulse shaping.