Advantageous grain boundaries in iron pnictide superconductors

Abstract

High critical temperature superconductors have zero power consumption and could be used to produce ideal electric power lines. The principal obstacle in fabricating superconducting wires and tapes is grain boundaries-the misalignment of crystalline orientations at grain boundaries, which is unavoidable for polycrystals, largely deteriorates critical current density. Here, we report that High critical temperature iron pnictide superconductors have advantages over cuprates with respect to these grain boundary issues. The transport properties through well-defined bicrystal grain boundary junctions with various misorientation angles (thetaGB) were systematically investigated for cobalt-doped BaFe2As2 (BaFe2As2:Co) epitaxial films fabricated on bicrystal substrates. The critical current density through bicrystal grain boundary (JcBGB) remained high (> 1 MA/cm2) and nearly constant up to a critical angle thetac of ~9o, which is substantially larger than the thetac of ~5o for YBCO. Even at thetaGB > thetac, the decay of JcBGB was much smaller than that of YBCO.

to appear in Nature Communications

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Versatile fluoride substrates for Fe-based superconducting thin films
• Anomalous scaling behavior in a mixed-state Hall effect of a cobalt-doped BaFe2As2 epitaxial film with a high critical current density over 1 MA/cm2
• Lessons from Oxypnictide Thin Films
• High critical current density and low anisotropy in textured Sr1-xKxFe2As2 tapes for high field applications