Non-Linear Transmission Lines (NLTLs) as pulse-forming Shocklines

Nice. I know Zoya slightly from having visited CU Boulder and JILA a couple of times back when I was doing antenna-coupled tunnel junctions. She’s definitely one of the ones.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There was a spinoff from LLNL, a guy who made high voltage shock lines from discete inductors and power diodes.

And some ceramic caps are nonlinear. Somebody made a shock line from two slabs of copper with ceramic between, basically a long skinny capacitor. Also high voltage.

I think the fastest samplers now are optical or electro-optical, using femtosecond lasers.

Hamamatsu made a sampler based on streak tube technology, but it wasn't a commercial success.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Thanks for posting this. IIRC there was some discussion of NLTLs here involving someone from Picosecond Pulse Labs (since aquired by Tektronix) around Dec 2014 when I first downloaded Breitbarth's thesis. The second paper is new to me.

Glen

A lab in Germany recently published a technique for making temporal measurements with attosecond resolution. It uses lasers. Their technique was developed to study the birth of quantum-entangled electrons from a parent atom.

I kind recall that discussion. May have been around when Larkin poosted a bunch of pictures of Agoston's waveguide sampler.

Breitbarth worked at Picosecond Pulse Labs for a while.

Joe

I read about these as well.

Yes. I think the limit is how fast the opotical material reacts to the pulse, not the pulse width.

The nuclear folk used to use streak tubes because nothing else worked back then.

Joe

I tried to buy one back in my tunnel junction days, but it was $125k iirc and I couldn’t get the money approved.

Cool gizmo though!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs