Continuous Deposition and Rapid Fabrication of Self-Epitaxial<tex>$rm CeO_2$</tex>Cap Layers by PLD Method on IBAD Buffers

Abstract

We have fabricated long buffered substrate tapes by a reel-to-reel process. The architecture is a self-epitaxial PLD-CeO/sub 2/ cap layer on an IBAD-Gd/sub 2/Zr/sub 2/O/sub 7/ buffered Hastelloy-C 276 tape. At the same time, we have investigated the effect of the deposition temperature for self-epitaxial growth of the PLD-CeO/sub 2/ cap layer. We found that a deposition temperature of 500/spl deg/C for the self-epitaxial PLD-CeO/sub 2/ cap layer is the best in the range of 200/spl deg/C and 800/spl deg/C for O/sub 2/ pressure of 10-30 mTorr in terms of the in-plane grain alignment. At the deposition temperature of 500/spl deg/C in the reel-to-reel process, we obtained a PLD-CeO/sub 2/ cap layer with /spl Delta//spl phi/ values of about 5 degrees at a tape transfer speed of 6 m/h for IBAD-GZO tapes with /spl Delta//spl phi/ values of about 15 degrees in 100 m class long tapes. Furthermore, we also obtained a PLD-CeO/sub 2/ cap layer with better /spl Delta//spl phi/ values of 3.7-4.4 degrees at a tape transfer speed of 2 m/h for a 55 m long tape.