The fabrication process of a high performance and pure c-axis grown GdBCO bulk superconductor with the TSMT-IG technique

Abstract

It is very important to choose a suitable seed crystal in the fabrication process of the (RE)BCO bulk superconductors by the top-seeded growth method, because a defective seed would result in the failure of the entire sample. Therefore, for optimizing the seed, a new approach is proposed in this paper for the fabrication process of Gd-Ba-Cu-O (GdBCO) bulk with promising superconducting properties. We developed the top-seeded melt texture and infiltration growth (TSMT-IG) process based on the modified top-seeded infiltration and growth (TSIG) process. In this modified infiltration growth, a mini pellet of thin melting texture (TMT) GdBCO was inserted between the NdBCO seed crystal and the solid-phase precursor pellet, resulting in the successful formation of well purified c-axis-oriented GdBCO crystals with a proper-sized TMT layer. The growth morphology, microstructure, side growth boundary, and superconducting properties of the GdBCO bulk superconductors with three different sizes of TMT pellets were studied in this paper. The results proved that the success rate for the fabrication of single-domain GdBCO bulk superconductors can be improved by the TSMT-IG process, which can also effectively inhibit the random nucleation phenomenon at some extent during the process of single-domain GdBCO bulk superconductor growth. In addition, the application of this new growth technology can help us not only to improve the growth performance of GdBCO samples with a proper size of the TMT mini pellet but also reduce the fabrication cost due to the use of only one precursor powder.