SLAC implements pulsed, step-down power converter for energy savings
Depressed collectors have been used for decades to improve the efficiency of vacuum-electronic based RF power sources by recovering energy from the spent electron beam of an RF source, such as a klystron or inductive output tube. The main thrust has been for applications with stringent energy-efficiency requirements, such as space-based communication. To date, there has not been wholesale utilisation of RF sources with depressed collectors for accelerator applications, the likely reasons being that the energy savings over RF sources with conventional, grounded collectors might not justify the additional investment, and that many accelerator-based applications have very short RF pulses with high peak power, making implementation of depressed collectors technically challenging.