Materials Research on High-Entropy Alloy Superconductors

The first purpose of this chapter is materials research on face-centered-cubic (fcc) high-entropy alloy (HEA) superconductors, which have not yet been reported. We have investigated several Nb-containing multicomponent alloys. Although we succeeded in obtaining Nb-containing samples with the dominant fcc phases, no superconducting signals appeared in these samples down to 3 K. The microstructure analyses revealed that all samples were multi-phase, but the existence of several new Nb-containing HEA phases was confirmed in them. The second purpose is the report of materials research on the Mn5Si3-type HEA superconductors. This hexagonal structure offers various intermetallic compounds, which often undergo a superconducting state. The Mn5Si3-type HEA is classified into the multisite HEA, which possesses the high degree of freedom in the materials design and is good platform for studying exotic HEA superconductors. We have successfully found a single-phase Mn5Si3-type HEA, which, however, does not show a superconducting property down to 3 K. The attempt of controlling the valence electron count was not successful.

The Fabrication of MgB2 Film and Nano-Bridge by EB and FIB

100nm thin Mg/B precursor films were prepared on SiC substrates in ZZSX-500 vacuum coating machine. They were annealed by electron-beam(EB) which only took fractions of a second. In this paper the best annealing duration to fabricate the superconducting MgB2 thin films was investigated. Under the optimized annealing condition(accelerating voltage 15kV, electron beam current 5mA, annealing duration 0.7s), the superconducting MgB2 thin film with critical temperature Tconset~35.3 K and transition width ∆Tc~1K was fabricated. Besides that, a nano-bridge (about 100×200nm2) was etched on the superconducting MgB2 thin film by Focused Ion Beam (FIB). It’s a relative simple and efficient method. The nano-bridge exhibited the effect of Josephson junction with RSJ characteristics. At the same time a little loss of superconducting property was detected.