Common Anode Amplifier Development

As accelerator beam intensity increases, loading of the RF system becomes a serious problem. Typical solutions include careful accelerating cavity design and active feedback schemes. Since the goal is to provide a low accelerating gap impedance, it is possible to simply drive the gap with a low output impedance amplifier. The "common anode" (also called cathode follower) configuration seems to be ideally suited for such an amplifier but has not received much attention in high power amplifier applications. This paper describes the construction and testing program of high power common anode configured RF amplifiers carried out at the Zero Gradient Synchrotron (ZGS). While amplifiers of this type seem limited to lower frequency accelerator applications, they may prove to be a viable alternative to the more conventional approaches currently in use.