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Register a new userEnhancement of Critical Current Density in low level Al-doped MgB2
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Two sets of MgB2 samples doped with up to 5 at. % of Al were prepared in different laboratories using different procedures. Decreases in the a and c lattice parameters were observed with Al doping confirming Al substitution onto the Mg site. The critical temperature (Tc) remained largely unchanged with Al doping. For 1 - 2.5 at.% doping, at 20K the in-field critical current densities (Jcs) were enhanced, particularly at lower fields. At 5K, in-field Jc was markedly improved, e.g. at 5T Jc was enhanced by a factor of 20 for a doping level of 1 at.% Al. The improved Jcs correlate with increased sample resistivity indicative of an increase in the upper critical field, Hc2, through alloying.
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A relatively high critical temperature, Tc, approaching 40 K, places the recently-discovered superconductor magnesium diboride (MgB2) intermediate between the families of low- and copper-oxide-based high-temperature superconductors (HTS). Supercurrent flow in MgB2 is unhindered by grain boundaries, unlike the HTS materials. Thus, long polycrystalline MgB2 conductors may be easier to fabricate, and so could fill a potentially important niche of applications in the 20 to 30 K temperature range. However, one disadvantage of MgB2 is that in bulk material the critical current density, Jc, appears to drop more rapidly with increasing magnetic field than it does in the HTS phases. The magnitude and field dependence of Jc are related to the presence of structural defects that can pin the quantised magnetic vortices that permeate the material, and prevent them from moving under the action of the Lorentz force. Vortex studies suggest that it is the paucity of suitable defects in MgB2 that causes the rapid decay of Jc with field. Here we show that modest levels of atomic disorder, induced by proton irradiation, enhance the pinning, and so increase Jc significantly at high fields. We anticipate that chemical doping or mechanical processing should be capable of generating similar levels of disorder, and so achieve technologically-attractive performance in MgB2 by economically-viable routes.
The high resistivity of many bulk and film samples of MgB2 is most readily explained by the suggestion that only a fraction of the cross-sectional area of the samples is effectively carrying current. Hence the supercurrent (Jc) in such samples will be limited by the same area factor, arising for example from porosity or from insulating oxides present at the grain boundaries. We suggest that a correlation should exist, Jc ~ 1/{Rho(300K) - Rho(50K)}, where Rho(300K) - Rho(50K) is the change in the apparent resistivity from 300 K to 50 K. We report measurements of Rho(T) and Jc for a number of films made by hybrid physical-chemical vapor deposition which demonstrate this correlation, although the reduced effective area argument alone is not sufficient. We suggest that this argument can also apply to many polycrystalline bulk and wire samples of MgB2.
Doping of MgB2 by nano-SiC and its potential for improvement of flux pinning was studied for MgB2-x(SiC)x/2 with x = 0, 0.2 and 0.3 and a 10wt% nano-SiC doped MgB2 samples. Co-substitution of B by Si and C counterbalanced the effects of single-element doping, decreasing Tc by only 1.5K, introducing pinning centres effective at high fields and temperatures and enhancing Jc and Hirr significantly. Compared to the non-doped sample, Jc for the 10wt% doped sample increased by a factor of 32 at 5K and 8T, 42 at 20K and 5T, and 14 at 30K and 2T. At 20K, which is considered to be a benchmark operating temperature for MgB2, the best Jc for the doped sample was 2.4x10^5A/cm2 at 2T, which is comparable to Jc of the best Ag/Bi-2223 tapes. At 20K and 4T, Jc was 36,000A/cm2, which was twice as high as for the best MgB2 thin films and an order of magnitude higher than for the best Fe/MgB2 tapes. Because of such high performance, it is anticipated that the future MgB2 conductors will be made using the formula of MgBxSiyCz instead of the pure MgB2.
In this Letter, the study of the effect of Al substitution on the upper critical field, Bc2, in AlxMg1-xB2 samples is presented. We find a straightforward correlation between Bc2 and the sigma-band gap, Delta_sigma, evaluated by point-contact measurements. Up to x=0.2 Bc2 can be well described within a clean limit model and its decrease with x is directly related to the suppression of Delta_sigma. For larger doping we observed the crossover to the dirty regime driven mostly by the strong decrease of Delta_sigma rather than by the increase of the sigma-band scattering rate
The influence of the nature of the boron precursor on the superconducting properties of polycrystalline MgB2 was studied. Critical current densities for the MgB2 made from high purity amorphous boron are at least a factor of three higher than typical values measured for standard MgB2 samples made from amorphous precursors. Two possible mechanisms are proposed to account for this difference. Samples made from crystalline boron powders have around an order of magnitude lower Jc compared to those made from amorphous precursors. X-ray, Tc and resistivity studies indicate that this is as a result of reduced current cross section due to the formation of Mg-B-O phases. The samples made from amorphous B contain far fewer Mg-B-O phases than crystalline B despite the fact that the amorphous B contains more B2O3. The different reactivity rates of the precursor powders accounts for this anomaly.
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