Transport Coefficients in Y-Ba-Cu-O System for Ionized Jet Deposition Method

Ionized jet deposition (IJD) is a Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) deposition technique suitable for the deposition of a wide range of materials on various solid substrates. Some of the main benefits of IJD are flexibility and a high number of deposition parameters such as pulse frequency, the distance between target and substrate, or acceleration voltage. These attributes provide the option to set the deposition according to the precise needs of any material. This deposition method has the potential for cost-effective scale-up and makes it viable for High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) tapes fabrication. HTS tapes are very sensitive to chemical composition, therefore, it is necessary to partially adjust the input stoichiometry of the target in order to achieve the desired stoichiometry of the prepared film. This study is aimed at the influence of target stoichiometry on the chemical composition of prepared YBCO thin films. In this work, all deposition parameters were fixed except for the target stoichiometry. The substrate temperature was set to 650 °C, the oxygen was used as working gas and the deposition frequency was set to 15 Hz. The samples and targets were analysed by scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy. In total 7 different stoichiometries are examined. The target stoichiometry ranges from Y
₁
Ba
_1.5
Cu
₃
O
_x
to Y
₁
Ba
₂
Cu
_4.5
O
_x
. The transport coefficients are calculated for this set of experimental conditions based on the observed data.