Significant flux trapping in single grain GdBCO bulk superconductor under off-axis field cooled magnetization

Abstract

A single grain bulk high-temperature superconductor (HTS) exhibits intensified flux trapping performance upon field cooled magnetization. The world record of trapped flux is 17.6 T achieved by using stacked two-fold GdBCO bulks. However, the majority of magnetization studies focused on the magnetization along the crystallographic c-axis. In the present study, we clarify the flux trapping performance under field cooled magnetization using an off-axis magnetic field with respect to the c-axis. The results show that the trapped flux is almost polarized along the applied field as expected. This tendency remains up to a high off-axis angle θ around 60°. It is worth mentioning that, with θ of 30°, the maximum trapped flux component B//max parallel to the c-axis significantly remains more than 96% of 1.6 T which occurs under on-axis magnetization. Meanwhile, the angular dependence of the c-axis parallel component exhibits that observed flux density is higher than that expected from 1.6 cosθ. In addition, to visualize the flux line upon magnetization at θ of 90°, we successfully demonstrate the continuous flux line trace using steel wires; different trapped flux behaviour appears when applied field penetrates the bulk through the growth sectors centre and along the growth sector boundary, respectively. We interpret these results may come from the microstructure as a result of melt growth. It is highly emphasized that the off-axis magnetization with the finite inclination angle is quite useful for introducing into the design of HTS applications.