High-material yield fabrication of YBCO coated conductors by Nd:YAG-PLD system

In order to fabricate superconducting coated conductors with lower cost, fabrication processes are required high material yield. We report an improvement of the material yield of YBCO films prepared by inside-plume Nd:YAG pulsed laser deposition method on metal substrates with an architecture of CeO2/LMO/IBAD-MgO/GZO/HastelloyTM. In this study, we shortened a distance from the target to the substrate (dT-S) in order to improve the material yield. Additionally, we have used Nd:YAG laser because initial and running costs are anticipated to be lower than those of excimer laser. As a result, by shorting the dT-S from 40 mm to 20 mm, the material yield increased on 10 mm×10 mm substrates. Additionally, by changing the O2 pressure (PO2) from 40 Pa to 400 Pa at dT-S = 20 mm, the material yield had a local maximal value of 18.6% at PO2=200 Pa. On multi-turn (MT) metal substrates, the material yield reached 56.0%. However, the critical current density (Jc) of the YBCO film which was deposited at dT-S = 20 mm and PO2=200 Pa on the 10 mm×10 mm substrate was 1.2 MA/cm2 at the edges and 0.2 MA/cm2 at the center at 77 K in self-field, although the YBCO films showed good aligned crystal textures. In order to improve this non-uniformity, we tilted the surface normal of the target 15 degree from a line connecting target and substrate. As a result, we achieved the uniformity in deposition rate. Then, we prepared YBa1.78Cu2.9Oy target to fabricate YBCO films with stoichiometric composition and obtained the uniform-high Jc.