The effect of impurities on the local and bulk properties of melt-processed superconductors

✍ Scribed by Hiroshi Ikuta; Tadashi Iwasaki; Uichiro Mizutani

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 128 KB
• Volume: 426-431
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-4534
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physc.2005.05.025

✦ Synopsis

Bulk Sm-Ba-Cu-O superconductors doped with ZnO up to 0.1 wt.% were fabricated by melt processing. The addition of a slight amount of ZnO was found to be very effective in increasing the trapped field of the bulk sample. By measuring the local properties, we found that the increase in J c is particularly large in the region near the seed crystal, where the amount of Sm 2 BaCuO 5 (Sm211) inclusions is deficient due to a segregation. Our results show that the addition of ZnO creates pinning centers that are distributed homogeneously throughout the bulk sample, and that these pinning centers compensate the deficiency of Sm211 particles in the region near the seed crystal.