Multipactor

After a brief historical review that includes the origin of the term multipactor, a description is given of the several ways in which multipactor manifests itself. The classical analysis of the relation between spacing, frequency, RF voltage, and phase is repeated and extended to give an explicit expression for the saturated power dissipation for the simple two-surface case. Comparisons with three sets of data given in earlier report suggests a ±3-dB level of accuracy for this expression. Some analysis of the cross-field multipactor and description of higher-order multipactor effects are given; the saturation problem for these cases remains to be solved