Electromagnetic Slow Wave Systems

It looks related to research into the properties of helical wave-guides at microwave frequencies which seemed to be a hot area of research in the mid 60s.

TWTs are based on slow-wave structures, so they're still pretty important. The math isn't that hard if the structure is vaguely regular--the helical-core transmission line is covered in Ramo, Whinnery, & Van Duzer, for instance, which is an upper-level undergraduate book.

Dielectric slow-wave structures have their uses in optics as well, especially for enhancing nonlinearities and other stuff such as particle acceleration.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

I'll see if I can screen-cap the particular scene, it was a stack of about 8 or 10 vintage books on various EM topics that all looked kinda interesting.

Whoever was working in the prop department that day seemed to have a good selection to pull from

The series is set in early 1984 and they seemed period-appropriate

Math treatment of TESLA COIL SECONDARIES!

And magnetrons, TWT, microwave chirp-antichirp.

See a pro review:

"This is an excellent book, concerned primarily with the wave guiding properties of certain classes of periodic structures. In particular, the author says heavy stressu pon coupled cavity chains and distributed helices, in contrast to the lumped electric filter and crystal lattice slow wave structures treated in Brillouin?sl classic work. Going far beyond previous textbook efforts in the area of distributed slow wave systems, Prof. Bevensee has brought together a large amount of detailed information, the final two-thirds of which was hitherto unpublished. The book should be of particular interest for persons with prior experience in the area, since little time is spent on introductory material and the analysis immediately proceeds at a high level.

After a brief introduction, the book opens with a chapter which describes some basic properties of slow wave systems and introduces the central problem of finding dispersion curves. (Incidentally, all chapters are initiated with very helpful synopses which outline the chapters and show their relationship to preceding ones.) Chapter I1 describes the helix in the traditional way and other assorted structures are treated briefly. In the next three chapters, the author warms up to his main topic: coupled cavity chains..