Fe(Se,Te) Thin Films Deposited through Pulsed Laser Ablation from Spark Plasma Sintered Targets

Abstract

Iron-based superconductors are under study for their potential for high-field applications due to their excellent superconducting properties such as low structural anisotropy, large upper critical fields and low field dependence of the critical current density. Between them, Fe(Se,Te) is simple to be synthesized and can be fabricated as a coated conductor through laser ablation on simple metallic templates. In order to make all the steps simple and fast, we have applied the spark plasma sintering technique to synthesize bulk Fe(Se,Te) to obtain quite dense polycrystals in a very short time. The resulting polycrystals are very well connected and show excellent superconducting properties, with a critical temperature onset of about 16 K. In addition, when used as targets for pulsed laser ablation, good thin films are obtained with a critical current density above 105 A cm−2 up to 16 T.

Keywords

• iron-based superconductors
• thin films
• pulsed laser ablation
• spark plasma synthesis
• critical current density