YBa/sub 2/Cu/sub 3/O/sub 7-/spl delta// thick films grown on textured metal substrates by liquid-phase epitaxy process

Towards high-current wire application of high-temperature superconductors, YBa/sub 2/Cu/sub 3/O/sub 7-/spl delta// (YBCO) thick films are grown by means of a liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) process on a [001] surface of NiO single crystal and laser-sputtered NiO buffer layer deposited on a [001] surface of SrTiO/sub 3/ single crystal. NiO buffer layers can be rapidly formed on textured Ni tape by the recently developed "surface-oxidation-epitaxy" (SOE) technique which is expected to be a low-cost production method of long metal substrates with highly-textured oxide buffer layer. LPE growth on SOE-buffered textured Ni tapes are also attempted. Moreover, we successfully prepared /spl sim/0.1 m-long LPE-YBCO tapes on {120}<21~0> Ag-0.1 wt.% Cu alloy tape by using a specially designed LPE furnace equipped with a "reel-to-reel" attachment. BaF/sub 2/-added BaO-CuO flux is used in this work, in which the growth temperature of YBCO is drastically lowered from the usually used value of /spl sim/1000/spl deg/C down to 900-930/spl deg/C. While current transport performances of these LPE-YBCO films are still insufficient for high-current wire application, the present results show the high potential of this LPE process for long-length coated-conductor production.