Friday, 2C-02, 11:10-11:20

Chemically Grown YBCO Superconducting Multilayers*

Xavier Obradors

R. Vlad, M. Coll, T. Puig, A. Pomar, J. Gutiérrez, A. Palau, S. Ricart, P. Abellan, F. Sandiumenge, K. Zalamova, R. Huhne², B. Holzapfel², Y.Morilla³, J.Garcia-Lopez³, A. Usoskin⁴

¹Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, CSIC, Campus U.A.Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain
²IFW-Dresden, Institute for Metallic Materials, P.O. Box: 270116, 01171 Dresden,Germany
³Centro Nacional de Aceleradores, Av. Thomas A. Edison nº 7, Isla de La Cartuja. E-41092 Sevilla, Spain
⁴European High Temperature Superconductors GmbH & Co. KG D-63755 Alzenau, Germany

Chemical solution deposition (CSD) is a very competitive technique for obtaining highly epitaxial multilayered structures and so it is widely investigated as cost-effective production of all-chemical YBa₂Cu₃O₇ (YBCO) coated conductors. However, there is still a need to simplify the conductor architectures and so a detailed analysis of the different issues influencing the quality of the multilayers is required.

In this presentation we will discuss which are the required advances to engineer the multilayered structures when YBCO is grown from TFA precursors. We will show that the atomic planarity of buffer layers, instead of surface roughness, plays the key role in achieving high quality epitaxy and high critical currents. The degree of buffer layer epitaxy has been investigated by means of RBS-channeling and RHEED and it has been correlated with (001) atomically flat area determined from AFM images. This quantitative methodology has been applied to doped Ce_1-xM_xO₂ (M=Gd, Zr) cap layers in several types of metallic substrates (RABiT and IBAD) and we have determined which flatness is required to achieve all chemical CSD multilayers with high J_c values (J_c > 5 MA/cm₂ at 77 K).

* We acknowledge financial support from MEC (MAT2005-02047, NAN2004-09133-C03-01, MAT2006-26543-E), Consolider Nanoselect, Generalitat de Catalunya (Pla de Recerca SGR-0029 and XaRMAE), CSIC (PIF-CANNAMUS) and EU (HIPERCHEM, NESPA)

Back to the Friday Schedule.