Development of Energy-Efficient Cryogenic Leads with High Temperature Superconducting Films on Ceramic Substrates

Abstract

Abstract High temperature superconductor (HTS) material can be used for the implementation of high-speed low-heat conduction data links to transport digital data from 4 K superconductor integrated circuits to higher-temperature parts of computing systems. In this work, we present a conceptual design of energy efficient interface and results in fabricating such HTS leads. Initial calculations have shown that the microstrip line cable geometry for typical materials employed in production of HTS thin films can be a two-layered film for which the two layers of about 10 cm long are separated by an insulation layer with as low permittivity as possible. With this architecture in mind, the pulsed laser deposition process has been designed in a 45 cm diameter vacuum chamber to incorporate an oscillating sample holder with homogeneous substrate heating up to 900°C, while the laser plume is fixed. This design has allowed us to produce 200 nm to 500 nm thick, 7 cm to 10 cm long YBa2Cu3O7 thin films with the homogeneous critical temperature (Tc) of about 90 K. The critical current density (Jc) of the short samples obtained from the long sample is of (2 ± 1) × 1010 A/m2. Lines of 3-100 μm wide have been successfully patterned along the length of the samples in order to directly measure the Tc and Jc values over the entire length of the samples, as well as to attempt the structuring of multichannel data lead prototype.