General regularities of magnetoresistive effects in the polycrystalline yttrium and bismuth high-temperature superconductor systems

Abstract

The influence of thermomagnetic prehistory on the behavior of a resistive transition R(T) in external magnetic fields of polycrystalline YBa2Cu3O7 and Bi1.8Pb0.3Sr1.9Ca2Cu3Ox high-temperature supercon-ductors and the Bi1.8Pb0.3Sr1.9Ca2Cu3Ox + Ag texture has been investigated. It has been found that, for YBa2Cu3O7, the thermomagnetic prehistory exerts a substantial influence on the dissipation in the subsystem of grain boundaries in magnetic fields up to ∼103 Oe, and this effect becomes insignificant in fields higher than ∼104 Oe. This behavior has been explained by the influence of magnetic moments of high-temperature superconductor grains on the effective magnetic field in the intergranular medium. For bismuth high-temperature superconductors, no influence of thermomagnetic prehistory on the resistive transition has been observed; however, this effect manifests itself in current-voltage characteristics at high transport current densities. There is also a radical difference in the behavior of isotherms of the magnetoresistance R(H) for the yttrium and bismuth systems. For YBa2Cu3O7, there is a clear separation between the dissipation regimes in the intergranular medium and in grains, which manifests itself even at low transport current densities as a change of sign in the curvature of the dependence R(H). For a texture based on the bismuth high-temperature superconductor, this feature has been observed only at high current densities (comparable to the critical current density at H = 0). This difference in the behavior of magnetoresistive properties of the classical high-temperature superconductor systems under investigation has been explained by relatively low irreversibility fields of the bismuth high-temperature superconductors. In these materials, simultaneous processes of dissipation can occur in an external magnetic field both in the subsystem of grain boundaries between crystallites and in the crystallites themselves.