Fabricating RE2Zr2O7 Buffer Layers by Low Cost Electrodeposition

Electrodeposition (ED), a novel and low cost method for epitaxial growth of La2Zr2O7 (LZO) and Gd2Zr2O7 (GZO) buffer layers on the biaxially textured Ni-5at%W (Ni-5W) substrate, was successfully developed to reduce the production cost of the second generation high temperature coated conductors. Combined with magnetron sputtering (MS) method, the architecture of MS-CeO2/ED-RE2Zr2O7 was obtained to replace the multilayers deposited only by MS system. Using electrodeposition, the full-width at half maximum (FWHM) values of phi (§ ) scans (in-plane texture) and omega (ω) scans (out-of plane texture) are 7.2° and 6.8°, respectively, for a typical LZO layer with 60 nm thickness. The corresponding values are 6.7° and 5.8° for 60 nm-thick GZO layers fabricated by the same method. YBa2Cu3O7-δ (YBCO) films with superconducting transitions are subsequently obtained on ED-LZO/Ni-5W, ED-GZO/Ni-5W and MS-CeO2/ED-LZO/Ni-5W structures by using pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) system.