Strong pinning at high growth rates in Rare Earth Barium Cuprate

TL;DR

This paper introduces a liquid assisted processing (LAP) method that enables rapid growth and enhanced vortex pinning in REBCO films during pulsed laser deposition, improving performance at high growth rates.

Contribution

The study presents a simple LAP technique that simultaneously achieves high growth rates and strong pinning in REBCO films, overcoming previous limitations.

Findings

LAP enables growth rates over 250 nm/min at 50 Hz.

LAP improves pinning strength 5-10 times over standard films.

LAP allows for effective RE mixing, enhancing low-temperature pinning.

Abstract

We present a simple liquid assisted processing (LAP) method, to be used in-situ during pulsed laser deposition growth to give both rapid growth rates (50 Hz deposition leading to >250 nm/min with a single plume) and strong pinning (improved x 5-10 over plain standard YBCO films grown at similar rates). Achieving these two important features simultaneously has been a serious bottleneck to date. LAP enhances the kinetics of the film growth so that good crystalline perfection can be achieved at up to 60 x faster growth rates than normal, while also enabling artificial pinning centres to be self assembled into fine nanocolumns. In addition, LAP allows for RE mixing (80% of Y with 20% of Yb, Sm, or Yb+Sm), creating effective point-like disorder within the REBCO lattice and which leads to strongly improved pinning at 30 K and below. Overall, LAP is a simple method which could be adopted by other in-situ physical or vapour deposition methods (i.e PLD, MOCVD, evaporation, etc) to significantly enhance both growth rate and performance.