Earticle

We have investigated the electrical transport properties of polycrystalline tantalum nitride (TaNx) films. Various compositions of tantalum (nitride) thin films have been deposited on SiO2 substrates by reactive DC magnetron sputtering while changing the ratio of nitrogen partial pressure. The substrate temperature was maintained at 283 K during deposition. X-ray diffraction analyses indicated the presence of α-Ta and β-Ta phases in the Ta film deposited in pure argon atmosphere, while fcc-TaNx phases appeared in the sputtering gas mixture of argon and nitrogen. The N/Ta atomic ratio in the film increased ranging from 0.36 to 1.07 for nitrogen partial pressure from 7 to 20.7%. The superconducting transition temperatures of the TaNx thin films were measured to be greater than 3.86 K with a maximum of 5.34 K. The electrical resistivity of TaNx thin film was in the range of 177-577 μΩcm and increased with an increase in nitrogen content. The upper critical filed at zero temperature for a TaN0.87 thin film was estimated to exceed 11.3 T, while it showed the lowest Tc = 3.86 K among the measured superconducting TaNx thin films. We try to explain the behavior of the increase of the residual resistivity and the upper critical field for TaNx thin films with the nitrogen content by using the combined role of the intergrain Coulomb effect and disorder effect by grain boundaries.

단결정의 덩어리 시료로부터 박리된 NbSe2와 FeSe 박막을 이용한 동종 초전도 vdW 접합을 만들고 저온 전도측정을 통해 JJ 효과를 확인하였다. 각 물질의 초전도 틈을 측정하였으며 기존 결과와 잘 일치하는 것을 확인하였다. FeSe 접합의 경우 NbSe2 접합과 다르게 JJ가 구현되지 않는 경우가 다수 발생하는데 이는 NbSe2와 구분되는 FeSe의 특성때문으로 보이며 일관성있는 JJ 구현을 위해서 저온 접합이나 접합 각도 의존성을 통한 향후 연구가 필요하다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 본 연구 결과는 FeSe 2차원 결정을 이용해 JJ가 잘 구현될 수 있음을 실험적으로 보인 첫 사례로서 그 의의를 갖는다.

Heterostructures fabricated by various combinations of van der Waals (vdW) materials enable us to investigate disorder-free physical properties and realize novel functional devices. Superconducting vdW junctions have attracted a lot of attention because of its simple structure without a barrier layer. In superconducting vdW junction, without extra fabrication effort, a natural barrier can be formed, whose character is sensitive to distance and angle of lattice between two superconducting vdW materials. Using high-quality single crystals and the dry transfer technique, we fabricated the vertically stacked NbSe2/NbSe2 and FeSe/FeSe vdW junctions and investigated their Josephson junction properties. We found that in the FeSe junctions, Josephson coupling is extremely sensitive to the fabrication conditions, in contrast to the NbSe2 junctions. We attributed this distinct character of the FeSe junctions to surface instability and small Fermi surface of FeSe.

Superconductor-ferromagnet thin film heterostructure is an ideal system for studying the interplay between superconductivity and ferromagnetism. These two antagonistic properties combined in thin film heterostructure create interesting proximity effects such as spin-triplet superconductivity. Thin film heterostructure of optimally doped La2-xSrxCuO4(LSCO) cuprate superconductor and SrRuO3(SRO) ruthenate ferromagnet has been grown by pulsed laser deposition. Its temperature-dependent resistivity and Hall effect measurements show that our LSCO/SRO heterostructure has both superconductivity and ferromagnetism. In the Hall effect measurement results, we find additional hump-like structures appear in the anomalous Hall effect signal in the vicinity of superconducting transition. We conclude that giant magnetoresistance of the LSCO layer distorts the AHE signal, which results in a hump-like structure.

We investigated the structural suitability of GdFeO3 (GdFO) as a buffer layer for the GdBa2Cu3O7-x (GdBCO) superconducting films. GdFO films with different thicknesses and GdBCO thin films were all prepared by using a pulsed laser deposition technique. The analyses of X-ray diffraction and EXAFS data indicates that the c-axis parameter increases and the Fe-O bond length decreases with the GdFO thickness due to the compressive stain induced by the lattice mismatch between GdFO and STO substrate and as a result, the Debye-Waller factor, an index of disorder in the local structure near the Fe-O bond, increases with the GdFO thickness. However, for the GdBCO/GdFO bilayer structure, the Debye-Waller factor decreases as the GdFO thickness increases indicating a diminished disorder by the structural coupling between GdFO and GdBCO. These results indicate that an appropriate thickness of GdFO is required to be utilized as a magnetic buffer layer for the GdBCO superconducting films.

We have studied the breaking system that combines a resistive superconducting fault current limiter (SFCL) and a DC circuit breaker for DC fault current. To verify the design of the 15 kV DC SFCL, which was driven from the previous work, a 500 V DC system was built and a scale-down SFCL were manufactured. The manufactured SFCL module was designed as a bifilar coil which is a structure that minimizes inductive reactance. The manufactured SFCL module has been experiment to verify characteristics of the current-limiting performance in the DC 500 V system. Also, the manufactured FCL module was combined with the DC circuit breaker to be experimented to analyze the breaking performance. As a result of the experiment, when SFCL was combined to the DC circuit breaker, the energy dissipation received by the DC circuit breaker was reduced by up to 84% compared to when the DC circuit breaker operates alone. We are preparing methods and experiments for the optimal method for much higher performance as a future work.

This paper presents a design methodology of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. The magnet consists of several double pancake coils with a variety of wire width. This technique, named Multi-Width, is well known to make efficient use of the superconducting wire. It is common for design of high-temperature superconducting magnets to not only reduce wire consumption used, but also consider the homogeneity of the magnetic field. In this paper, we study a design method that efficiently reduces wire usage while considering magnetic field homogeneity. The design is carried out by calculating the critical current and the critical magnetic field according to the configuration of arranging the thickness of the wire to determine the number of windings. The width of wire comprising the magnet was set to 4 – 12 mm, and the number of double pancake coils was set to an even number to consist of top-down symmetry. To verify the validity of the design, we compared the progress of the design code with a complete enumeration survey. As a case study, we designed a magnet that generates a central magnetic field of 3 T or more in a 240 mm bore in diameter. Optimality can be evaluated by weighing wire consumption and field homogeneity according to the magnet's use or user preference.