Asymmetric stress engineering of dense dislocations in brittle superconductors for strong vortex pinning

TL;DR

This paper introduces an asymmetric stress engineering method via extrusion to generate high-density dislocations in high-temperature superconductors, significantly enhancing their vortex pinning and current-carrying capacity.

Contribution

It presents a novel scalable approach to induce dense dislocations in brittle superconductors using asymmetric stress fields, improving their superconducting performance.

Findings

Dislocations with densities approaching metals were achieved in IBS.

A fivefold increase in current capacity at 33 T was observed.

The method offers a general framework for dislocation manipulation in rigid crystals.

Abstract

Large lossless currents in high-temperature superconductors (HTS) critically rely on dense defects with suitable size and dimensionality to pin vortices, with dislocations being particularly effective due to their one-dimensional geometry to interact extensively with vortex lines. However, in non-metallic compounds such as HTS with rigid lattices, conventional deformation methods typically lead to catastrophic fracture rather than dislocation-mediated plasticity, making it a persistent challenge to introduce dislocations at high density. Here, we propose an asymmetric stress field strategy using extrusion to directly nucleate a high-density of dislocations in HTS by activating shear-driven lattice slip and twisting under superimposed hydrostatic compression. As demonstrated in iron-based superconductors (IBS), atomic displacements of nearly one angstrom trigger the formation of tilted dislocation lines with a density approaching that of metals. With further structural refinement, these dislocations serve as strong pinning centers that lead to a fivefold enhancement in the current-carrying capacity of IBS at 33 T, along with low anisotropy and a large irreversibility field. This work not only establishes a scalable route to engineer pinning landscapes in HTS, but also offers a generalizable framework for manipulating dislocation structures in rigid crystalline systems.